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9/13/2002
I'm moving!
If you haven't already been forwarded there the new site: www.shilohbucher.com is up now, though still a work in progress.
9/7/2002
Hello, again!
Still working on getting Movable Type to work on new site; also new site is still not accessible from my own home computer. Have no idea why DNS hasn't been updated; it's been at least two weeks. New site will be located at www.shilohbucher.com, where even as we speak lies the new shell. If any good person should happen to be reading this (God bless you!), please let me know if you can access the new site. Will let you know when new site is up!
Peace out,
Shiloh
8/31/2002
TALK ABOUT SPEAKING TOO SOON
I was a tad optimistic a few weeks ago. I was thinking I could take a couple of months off after finishing the rough draft, but my advisor had different ideas. So I had to spend a week polishing the thing up. And then there were a million things I had been neglecting to do for the big paper. Plus I have been working on migrating to Movable Type with a new design and my own domain. This process is almost complete. Provided I can work out the kinks with the DNS, it should be up within the week.
7/31/2002
Hurrah!
7/2/2002
HULLO, GOOD PEOPLE!
Just to drop a line and confirm that this site is on hiatus as I bravely try to finish my Master's report in the face of so many leisure opportunities here in Austin. I am actually hoping to have my magnum opus completed by the 16th of this month July, which will be the first of hopefully many 29th birthdays. And then I shall have some time once more for the old bloggin'. Thanks for stopping by here to check! Hopefully it will not be in vain next time.
Best regards,
Shiloh
5/7/2002
BYPASSING THE BLOGOSPHERE,
5/6/2002
INTERESTED IN HEALTH POLICY?
The great Greg Scandlen has a blog of sorts-- it's emailed first, then eventually posted at the National Center for Policy Analysis (you can see back issues and subscribe here). I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the politics of health care. He's informative and delightfully acerbic! Here's what he has to say about the respective Parties' prescription drug bills:
----------------------------------------------------------------- Rs AND Ds OFFER Rx COVER FOR MEDICARE ----------------------------------------------------------------- House Republicans and Senate Democrats are each rolling out new prescription drugs for Medicare proposals. Both are serious proposals, and there isn't all that much difference between them, though you would never know it from the level of overheated rhetoric from the Democratic side. Senator Kennedy said seniors would be better off buying a bus ticket for Canada than "relying on this Republican proposal," and Senator Daschle said the Republican proposal "would be devastating for most seniors." My goodness. Yet the Republican proposal would cost the Feds (that means taxpayers) $350 billion over ten years. It would charge a monthly premium of $35 - $40 and would pay 70-75% of drug costs between $251 and $1,000, 50% of costs between 1,001 and $2,000, and 100% of costs in excess of $5,000. Meanwhile, the Democrat proposal, introduced at the last minute by Senators Zell Miller (D-GA) and Bob Graham (D-FL), would cost up to $425 billion over eight years, charge a monthly premium of $25, and pay 50% of expenses up to $4,000 and 100% after that. There is no word on whether formularies would be used, or whether there are different rates of payment for generic versus name-brand drugs. I don't particularly like either proposal because I can't see why young working families should be taxed to pay for drugs for wealthy 65- year-olds, but the differences between the proposals are eminently compromisable-hardly worth making such a fuss over. Except, of course, for political posturing. 5/3/2002
ONCE AGAIN
A great point is made over at the Brothers Judd Blog
It's hard to view the budget deficit as huge when it's only about the size of our annual farm subsidies, which we all recognize are a waste of money and, even worse, a transfer payment to the wealthy. You could balance the budget by getting rid of the Agriculture department and its attendant programs and have almost no deleterious effect on the American economy. But we haven't the political will to do so. 5/2/2002
GOOD QUESTION
John Podhoretz asks: Why do the U.S. networks keep putting Palestinian spokespeople on TV when they so obviously lie?
THE CEREBRAL FUNNYBONE
Discover has a article on the biology of laughter that is full of all kinds of fascinating facts that could be employed in a variety of conversational settings. I learned, for example, that rats are ticklish, that breeding ticklish rats intensifies the ticklishness of resulting offspring, that the human brain has its very own tickle spot, and that premature death may follow laughter at your own mother's funeral.
CLASSIC HYPOCRACY
We went running on the Hike and Bike Trail this evening, and who should be out there campaigning under the Mo-Pac bridge, but City Council candidate Kirk Mitchell. I amused Mr. Bucher to no end by informing him that Mr. Mitchell is running against the councilman he once financed, Daryl Slusher, because he doesn't think that the Austin City Council is concerned enough anymore with green issues.
Anyway, when I catch up with him at the bridge, Mr. Bucher is waiting on me, as usual, but instead of dying of exhaustion, he's dying laughing. He reports that the Sierra Club's Council candidate of choice, Kirk Mitchell, has now had his BMW parked in the middle of the road with the engine idling for at least a quarter hour. Meanwhile he continues to stump for votes, seemingly oblivious to the wanton waste of non-renewable natural resources and profligate effusion of car exhaust his Beemer is producing just ten feet away. And, of course, no one else seemed to see any inconsistency between word and deed, either.
Some environmentalist! The fact that his car was also haphazardly parked in a lane of traffic, shows, in my opinion, a egregious arrogance with respect to traffic issues. Though, if the environmentalists like Mr. Mitchell actually cared about the air pollution from all the cars idling in rush hour everyday, they'd support building this city more roads.
JUST IN TIME FOR SUMMER
I found it amusing yesterday that several fancy-schmancy restaurants in the Big Apple have discovered the hibiscus tea that all our hippie diners serve here in Austin. It's good stuff and good for you, but I'm almost sorry to see it become just another trend. I wonder if this will lead to a greater embrace of iced tea (the house wine of the South) among the glitterati. Constant Comment tastes great iced, as well, but hopefully that will remain our little secret.
NTM LES FRANÇAISES
Israel has absorbed the flow of Jewish refugees from the rest of the Middle East, from the former Soviet Republics, and even from Ethiopia. A mass exodus from France may be next.
WHOSE SCIENCE, WHOSE DEFINITIONS, WHOSE POLICIES?
Fairly objective piece in Washington Post about the 'controversy' over Bush's insistence that policy decisions be based on "sound science."
According to Pianin, "The debate is highly subjective, frequently turning on nuanced interpretations of complicated scientific research, which makes it difficult to prove or disprove many of the White House claims -- or the claims of Bush's critics." That seems like a cop-out to me. Why is it so hard for reporters who are supposedly so intelligent to make sense of scientific research? Maybe they should add a basic science component to the journalism curriculum.
The piece could really have benefited from a mention of Bjorn Lomborg's examination of the science behind many policy recommendations made by the environmental lobby, but that's probably too much to ask.
STRING 'EM UP
Is it just me, or is this a creepy photo of a May Day rally in France? Especially considering the violence that marked the "holiday" in Berlin.
Or here's a quiz: Which of these photos was taken in the West Bank and which in Berlin?
Maybe the garbage gives it away?
HERE IT IS
For everyone who has been wondering how Saddam skims off the money for his presidential palaces, extravagant birthday festivals, and weapons of mass destruction, The Wall Street Journal has the definitive scoop. Basically he levies an illegal surcharge on every barrel he sells to selected middlemen, who then pass the expense on to oil traders, and eventually to you, yourself, at the pump.
THIS IS INTERESTING
Via Anne Wilson, an answer to the water shortage we're always hearing about: nuclear desalination! Yet another solution to an environmental problem that will be a hard sell to the "environmentalists," though. But then, they don't want solutions, they want an end to global capitalism. And they want it yesterday.
RATS VERSION 2.0
Speaking of rodents, news arrived yesterday that human scientists had made some radical improvements on the common rat, notably adding a remote-control feature. Have they made these these cybernetically-enhanced rats "better, stronger, faster?" Well, no. But the good doctors do think they could be used in future search and rescue operations. I have to say that, were I buried in rubble, I'm not I'd take much comfort in the knowledge that there was a huge rat cyborg coming for me. I think I'd still want Lassie.
BLOOD ON THE TRACTOR
According to a researcher interviewed by ABC News:Vegetarian Diet Kills Animals. Yep, countless little moles and mice died so that you might have tofu, dude.
UPDATE: Don't forget the dead bunnies!
5/1/2002
ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS
DRESSING UP THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS WITH A JETPACK
Inspired by Mrs. Ken Layne's "Plutonium Gurl," I tried to make a superhero simulacrum of myself: Accessory Girl!
 Try it! It's fun!
THEY TOOK HIS SIDE
Amusing profile in the Chicago Tribune on one of my favorite organizations, the Independent Women's Forum. The author seems to be absolutely shocked that there exist smart educated women who aren't drinking the NOW Kool-Aid.
FATAH SAYS NO MASSACRE AT JENIN
Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank now agrees with the Israelis that there were fewer than 60 deaths in Jenin. And if Fatah says so, it must be true, no?
THE TERRORSTS HAVE NOT WON
Looks like tweezers are no longer verboten on the plane. This is good news, for as I mentioned a while ago, nothing beats airplane toilet lighting for thorough tweezing!
4/30/2002
HERE'S SOMETHING
Nice post-Earth Day editorial on the symbiotic, and increasingly pernicious, interaction between the environmental movement and the Democratic Party in The New Republic. TNR environmental writer, Gregg Easterbrook also has a great report from AEI-Brookings on Bush's record: Everything You Know About the Bush Environmental Record is Wrong.
HELLO, I'M STILL ALIVE!
But barely. Been working like a dog on the very large paper. At last my labor has borne fruit and I sent off a couple of meaty chapters to the Reader last night. So why not blog?
Yep, I just worked up my courage to look at the stats. Looks like as many as 84 fine people still saw fit to check the site out today. Bless your sweet hearts! I can't tell you how sorry I am to disappoint those who have been by the page recently in search of fresh content. I really do intend to keep this thing up once I churn out this thesis-like object. Thanks for the continued support, folks!
4/19/2002
HOROWITZ AT UT
Saw David Horowitz speak at the UT Law School a couple of weeks ago. It was an extremely interesting and surprisingly placid event. I was expecting more of a circus-type atmosphere or at least a few picketers. Not to say that everyone agreed with him, though the majority of the audience was quite sympathetic. He got several rounds of applause during his remarks. Among the dissenters were a pair of soft-spoken heckers sitting behind me. They conducted some kind of sarcarstic commentary throughout, though I couldn't understand what they were muttering. They sounded frighteningly like Hank Hill's mumbling friend Boomhauer. They even wore caps, but clearly not the gimme' variety and their necks were not red.
What contention there was occurred during the question and answer session. One guy remarked that he had only heard rhetoric from Horowitz during his speech. I can't judge what the questioner heard, but the remarks I listened to employed all manner of historical facts (referenced by books), statistics, and logical argument. Horowitz's interlocutor then posed this query, "I guess what I'm asking, is, why exactly you are against reparations?" The Man replied by asking him if he had been asleep during the last hour or not paying attention. (Much laughter, which the mumblers behind me condemned as "Not nice.") Horowitz remarked that, sadly enough, he gets this question often, and he suggested that some might be too hostile to his message to really be able to focus on his arguments. I think this was a plausible theory. Only one of the skeptical questioners really seemed to understand his arguments, and she only wanted to dispute a point of fact with him.
Another questioner took issue with Horowitz's caustic opening remarks about Johnny Cochran. O.J'.s lawyer is speaking tonight at a Law School symposium on reparations. He's also being paid the neat sum of $15,000 for his troubles. When questioned, Horowitz said he thought he, rather than the "morally challenged" Cochran, should be paid to speak to UT, which he had earlier labeled "a subsidiary of the Democratic party." At the very least, he tthought he should be allowed to speak at the reparations conference. As it was, the UT Federalist Society invited him to speak at lunch.
Among Horowitz's arguments and aphorisms:
4/18/2002
MAMMOGRAM SHAM
Sensible pieces on the mammography debate in the The New Republic and in the new issue of Real Simple (not online). In contrast, the Conde Nast women's magazines seem to be on the wrong side of yet another women's health issue. Well, there is an honest piece on self breast exam in Self this month, despite their championing of mammography last month. Turns out that there is no evidence that self exam reduces mortality, either. Fran Vico makes the point that all the money spent on little shower cards should have been spent on basic cancer research.
4/2/2002
THIS IS INTERESTING
There's a civil suit underway alleging that a Chicago hospital's practice of charging uninsured patients nine times as much as HMO members for the same procedures disproportionately affects Hispanics and is thus racist. These sorts of disparities are actually shockingly common. One of the ways HMOs were able to lower health care inflation was by wringing huge discounts from doctors and hospitals. The parties to the suit allege, though, that the hospital is not only discounting the HMO patients but inflating the costs of uninsured patients so as to get more money out of the government when those without insurance inevitably fail to pay. That's a fascinating allegation, but not nearly as interesting as the hospital's response.
While not disputing the overcharge, the owner of the hospital chain, Tenet Healthcare, claims the whole suit is part of a Republican agenda to attract Hispanics to the party by championing the cause of the uninsured. But, wait. Didn't the Democrats already patent that maneuver? Could the Republicans really be so dastardly as to attempt to actually help a minority group?
Well, maybe. It appears that the Chilean-American head of the organization behind the suits, Consejo de Latinos Unidos, does have some scary Republican connections, having previously worked for two Democratic bêtes-noires: Steve Forbes and the Father of Medical Savings Accounts, GOPAC sugardaddy J. Patrick Rooney. More to the point:
"If what you're trying to do is attract Latinos to Republican candidates, wouldn't the problems of the uninsured be in that community's interest?" asked Harry Anderson, vice president of corporate communications for Tenet, a corporation with 116 hospitals in 17 states. "It becomes a political issue."Indeed, it may. What is most mind-tingling to me these days is the shift that has occurred between the two parties with respect to health care reform. In the last decade, the Democrats have become the more conservative party on this issue. Unlike the GOP, which has consistantly pushed innovations like tax credits and medical savings accounts, the Democrats seek to maintain the status quo. It doesn't seem to matter to them that the current system, like Tate Healthcare, greatly favors those with employer-based health care and screws everyone else. As the New York Times would tell you, the poor and minorities are hit hardest. Just last fall, Democrats refused extensions of health care benefits to the unemployed because they were in the form of refundable tax-credits. They feared that the one-time use of such tax credits would threaten the employer-based system. Heaven forbid that anyone question the right of well-paid AFL-CIO members to shelter their sweet health benefits package from their taxable income. Better that the unemployed use the complicated and expensive COBRA system or, wait, even better(!), apply for Medicaid. Who cares if health care has become so expensive that the ranks of the working uninsured increase by tens of thousands every quarter? Not the Democrats! Not 'progressives'! In fact, their support of premium-increasing mandates and trial-lawyer-enriching rights-to-sue seems to indicate a real desire to destroy our healthcare system, that a single-payer may rise from the ash. By championing the cause of those who lose out in the employer-based system, Republicans are the only party fighting for real justice in health care reform. As the fella once said, ain't that a kick in the head? 4/1/2002
THE JOURNALIST OF CHOICE AMONG FUTURE BRITISH SUICIDE BOMBERS
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in the Independent of the many British Muslims who support Saddam. Who are these young Turks? In whom do they most trust? Just how far are they willing to go? Take a look:
Younger objectors are appearing across the country and I don't mean the usual suspects of under-educated street fighters in deprived areas. I am talking of young Muslims in sharp suits who are working in the City, at our major hospitals as doctors, about nouvelle restaurant owners and dynamic entrepreneurs, and a large number of brilliant university academics. Some have never before been engaged in the politics of fervour. They use the internet well; they know that Iraq was already 90 per cent compliant when the US deliberately provoked a new confrontation before imposing sanctions. They have been raised in a country where they have learnt important scepticism about politicians and the press. They trust only a handful of journalists, and Robert Fisk is one of them... The majority world view sees the US as in the vanguard of sustaining an unjust world order. And that is exactly what Noor, a young British woman, said to me on the phone late last Friday night before adding: "And you know I too can kill myself in Oxford Street, no problem, I am very angry and very upset for Iraqis"Charming, isn't she? You know, I find myself these days very angry and upset for Israelis, but I'll be damned if I'm going to go blow myself up over at the Austin Islamic Center. I love life and Coca-Cola far too much to do a thing like that. Besides, it's wrong, no matter how irritated you are.
WHY I LOVE WAL-MART, PART V
Tony Woodlief of the excellent Sand in the Gears predicts that as the new top dog of the Fortune 500, Wal-mart will soon be the target of high profile litigation. I wouldn't doubt it, though Jesse Jackson may have finally met his match in the Big W. Unlike many other large corporations, Wal-Mart no longer automatically settles to avoid the cost of further litigation. This strategy is one of the ways they keep their prices so low. Every year, thousands of people attempt to better their financial situation by suing their local Wal-Mart, often turning to lawyers who specialize in suing Sam. To combat this legal onslaught, the 'Mart aggressively fights those who would bleed them with torts and they usually win. If more corporations would follow their lead, there wouldn't be such a need for tort reform.
3/28/2002
AUSTIN BLOGFEST
Such as it was, it was really quite cool. Last Friday, fellow Austin blogger Chris Kerstiens and had a beer with me and my brother, Al, and my friend Ed on the famous Trudy's porch. Kerstiens is a very nice and amusing fellow, just as I had suspected.
MMMM...COFFEE
HELLO, GOOD PEOPLE
I haven't been a very good blogger lately, because I spend nearly all my spare time these days contemplating health care reform, with a special little focus lately on one of the greatest injustices of our time-- the exclusion of employer-based health care contributions from taxable income. Many smart people are unaware that folks whose employers arrange their health insurance situation get a huge tax break from the government. About $100 billion dollars worth annually. But if you buy your own health insurance, you get zippo from the feds. Instead, they tax you up the wazoo and then let you gather up the leftover crumbs to pay for health insurance on an increasingly expensive private market. Meanwhile, those who work for large firms that provide insurance suffer under the bizarre delusion that a visit to the doctor costs $15, the average co-payment. This $ 0.1 trillion tax break encourages all sorts of inefficiencies and overconsumption of health care services that then drive up insurance premiums for everyone. As prices go up, small firms are forced to drop coverage and even more people are left uninsured.
Now, I don't know if I ever mentioned that as a house-less, child-less, married, secondary-income-earner who enjoys a very nice benefits package from the State of Texas, this happens to be one of my few little tax shelters. Yet, I sincerely believe it should go and be replaced with a universal tax credit that would be fairer and lack the perverse incentives of the current tax exclusion. And I spend lots of time these days meditating on this and other issues of fairness in our health care system, to the recent detriment of my blog.
Imagine my shame, then, to find this website was not included on the good Nick Denton's list of "liberal" blogs. I would have been surprised normally if I were included on such a list, but for the charming method Mr. Denton uses to judge the liberal from the illiberal. Why, it's so simple! He defines liberal "as anyone who cares about injustice, whether in the US, or in the world at large." One is left to surmise then that bloggers not on the special "liberal" list couldn't give a rat's patooty for justice here or anywhere. That's really a very stupid assumption about A. Liberals and B. Everyone Else. I guess I'd feel worse if Layne weren't also inexplicably missing from Mr. Denton's list. To my mind, he's the classical liberal and I call myself proud to not be on a list that also excludes the likes of Ken Layne.
3/27/2002
CALLING ALL FOODIES
Alain Ducasse continued to amaze with his suggestions for roast chicken last week. The man is a freakin' genius. I was blown away by his suggestion to roast the chicken on top pieces of dark meat and garlic for especially chickeny juices. Kiss your roasting rack goodbye! Then, today he has some lovely thoughts on mangos and sour cream sorbet for dessert. Not as paradigm shifting as the chicken or steak pieces, but nonetheless delicious, I'm sure.
3/18/2002
IT'S CLARITIN TO ME
Claritin, the popular allergy medicine that does not cause drowsiness will soon be offered over-the-counter. Great news, right? Not for the New York Times, which grouses that mainly insurance companies will benefit from the reduction in price that is sure to result. As they put it: A Drug Will Cost Less. For Whom? Well, I guess it will help whoever is trying to pay the soaring insurance premiums. Hint: your employer doesn't pay your insurance premium. Even if he appears to write the check, the reality is that it's drawing on your wages. There are considerable tax benefits to this arrangement, but the illusion that health insurance is something that your firm "pays for" or "gives" you causes a lot of the problems in the health care system. Insurance premiums have gone up 25 to 50 percent in the last year. That's unsustainable for many small firms and there are likely to be considerable increases in the number of the uninsured this year. Surely even the Times knows that.
3/14/2002
Looks like I called the Yates case wrong. The jury probably wasn't allowed to read the sympathetic Newsweek article that had swayed me, but they got to hear lots and lots of evidence that I didn't. They also seemed to be pretty certain of their verdict, judging from their short deliberation time. It's very hard to be excused from such an evil act here in Texas. Just being crazy isn't enough. Some may think that's a little harsh, but it is our law. It actually used to be slightly more lenient before a nut-job from Lubbock tried to kill Reagan. Now you really have to be plum out of your mind to get off with an insanity defense, which is as it should be. After all, most sociopaths and evil-doers are missing some key gears upstairs.
I think this piece by Dahlia Lithwick is excellent in its analysis of how differently mothers who kill are treated from fathers who kill. In our society, children are too often seen as the pure property of the mother, so that she is the only victim if she kills them. A human being cannot justly be considered another's possession, to dispose of as she wishes. Andrea Yates is a sad sick soul, but given the evidence, her jury chose not deny the victimhood of those five little kids. 3/13/2002
STICKING IT TO THE DRUG COMPANIES
Forbes reports on the shortages of critical vaccines that have resulted from government price cuts to drug companies.
DID I SAY THURSDAY AFTERNOON?
Well, folks, last week was a little crazy. My fabulous sister-in-law was in town over the weekend and we had a great time taking her all over Central Texas, including a pilgrimage to the the Alamo and that other historic landmark across the street-- the Menger Bar. Am still wading through the subtle details of health care tax policy and attempting to imagine what life might be like were I ever to finish the really large paper. I miss blogging everyday, and hopefully will be able to resume the frenetic pace in a month or so.
MMMM, PASTA
Continuing his series in the NYT, Alain Ducasse reveals to us the secret of cooking pasta like risotto. Boy-o, boy-o, can't wait to try that at home.
3/8/2002
MORE ON THE GLORIES OF WAL-MART
Now, we learn that Wal-Mart is responsible for a significant chunk of the productivity gains of the Nineties. As if I couldn't love it more.
3/7/2002
WHAT TO REMEMBER
Yesterday was the 166th anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo. The Statesman had this story about attempts to document who the men were that died there. It's interesting enough, but I have to take issue with the reporter's specious summary of the events leading up to the siege of the Alamo:
The legendary Battle of the Alamo came after years of political scuffling. Two American presidents unsuccessfully tried to buy Texas land from Mexico, but thousands of white settlers were permitted to live in the area. Eventually those colonists began resisting Mexican rule. In December 1835, a small force composed mainly of Texan colonists defeated a Mexican force of about 1,200 soldiers in San Antonio and set up a fort in the Alamo.The colonists, many of whom were Hispanic, were not resisting Mexican rule, but rather the crushing oppression of the petty tyrant, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the self-styled "Napoleon of the West." After winning independence from Spain in 1811, Mexico had set up a democratic republic. Santa Anna was elected president of this republic in 1833, but in 1835 he led a military coup against it, set himself up as dictator, and suspended the Constitution of 1824. He also, interestingly enough, proceeded to disarm the state militias. Texas was not the first state to revolt against this and other affronts to liberty. The people of the central state of Zacatecas rebelled in the summer of 1835, but were quickly crushed by Santa Anna's forces, who were rewarded with two days of vicious looting and rape. The General then turned his attention to Texas and instructed officials in San Antonio to recall the cannon that had been given to the settlers in nearby Gonzales for defense against Indians. The colonists were living on the edge of the frontier and had previously served as a useful buffer between the often hostile natives and the inner portions of Mexico. The Revolution broke out over this cannon. The settlers in Gonzales refused to give it up and famously told Santa Anna's representative, "Come and take it." They tried and failed, and within a year the Texians had won their freedom from a military dictatorship, but not before the massacre at the Alamo. The Texas Revolution had nothing to do with US designs on Texas. In fact, it took a decade for the US to agree to accept Texas as a state after independence. It is important to know and remember that Texas' fight was not some random gringo landgrab. It was a just revolution for constitutional democracy and human liberty. The men at the Alamo knew that these were worth dying for and that is why we Texans will never forget them. 3/2/2002
100% AQUINAS
Yeah, I took that little philosophy test twice and both times was found to be thoroughly Thomistic, though the other influences seemed to vary according to what weight I gave the questions. I spent more time on these the first time, so I think the more accurate supporting cast is: Aristotle (98%), Epicureans (88%), Rand (82%), Mill (81%), Bentham (73%), Spinoza (71%), Stoics (69%). Can't argue with any of that, actually. Seems to be about right. Who'd ever have thought, though, that I'd ever become such a nice Catholic girl, at least philosophically?
Also, had least amount of affinity (4%) with someone named Nel Noddings, who apparently holds that "Traditional western ethics has oppressed female voices," whatever that means. Further, we "should look to traditional women's practices as a way of determining our ethics." Like what, for example? Foot-binding? Clitoridectomy? Please, someone make that woman take cultural anthropology and read The Handmaid's Tale.
LIVE FROM THE BIG APPLE
More Than Zero has NYC blogfest dish! Also, Andrew's take on that Left Wing show is, as usual, hilarious.
MMMMM, STEAK
Celebrity chef, Alain Ducasse gives some amazing advice for Steak With Style, applied to the humble rib-eye. Warning: just reading this may elevate blood cholesterol levels, cause uncontrollable mouth-watering, and force an emergency trip to the butcher shop.
2/28/2002
TOO LEGIT TO REMIT
Will Warren, the creator of Unremitting Verse, may or may not be an Acclaim Talent Agency model. It seems just as likely that he could be a conceptual designer. I can neither confirm nor deny that this is his den. All I really know about the man is that he is funny as hell and mindbogglingly clever. This send up of my favorite ex-president is priceless.
CHANGE OF FORMAT FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF MONTHS
As you may have noticed, my blogging output has been sub-par the past few weeks. Sadly, I have been working on my big fat paper, as part of an all too typical quid pro quo arrangement to finish my Master's. When I started blogging in October, I deluded myself in to thinking that it would help me write my thesis. No, seriously. And it has gotten me back in the habit of writing. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to get back in the habit of writing my thesis if it is going to be written by me (Calling all volunteers!). So I'm officially restricting myself to a couple days of blogging a week, which will be posted by Thursday afternoon. Below is the first installment of the new dropscan digest.
FUZZY THINKING AT THE TIMES
The Times' take on the designer baby reads: Baby Spared Mother's Fate by Genetic Tests as Embryo. This is not technically correct. The baby actually escaped the fate of its sibling embryos who were found to be unworthy of implantation and destroyed. The egg which was fertilized to form the chosen embryo already had not inherited it's mother's faulty gene. It is incorrect to say, then, that the child which grew from that embryo was spared from the mother's fate by the screening process. It's as though you picked a black marble from a bag of whites and declared that it was your selection of it which it made it black. It was already black-- that's why you picked it. Likewise, this child was born because it did not share its mother's flaw. Had it had the bad gene it would have been destroyed with the others, and another embryo would have been implanted. That embryo would be as different from the girl which was just born as one is from one's brother or sister. All you can say is that its parents were spared the heartache of bearing a child who would develop Alzheimer's disease should it live to be forty, and to achieve this end, who knows how many embryos were created and then destroyed.
I find this situation wanting as a test case for designer children. I can't help but wonder if the woman who has this disease believes it would have been better if she had never been born. We're not talking about some horrible form of birth defect that would doom a child born with it to terrible pain. Rather, it is a gene which causes a currently fatal disease that begins around forty. Is it now our societal consensus that a life that will end around forty is not worth living? Speaking as someone who is not yet thirty, I have to disagree. The tragedy of premature deaths is often intensified by all the things the young victim has already accomplished. Also, who is to say that there won't be a cure for any disease in the future? Scientists have forty years to cure any child born tomorrow with this genetic flaw. Should that happen, all those embryos were created and destroyed in vain.
UDDER MISTAKE
We are no longer an agrarian nation. A hundred and fifty years ago, life was simpler and people knew cow parts when they saw them. Now, we not only mistake the stray, discarded, and hacked-off cow teat found at the local car wash for a severed human penis, but the news travels all around the globe in a matter of hours. This is progress?
JUSTICE FOR SWIFT, IF NOT FOR AMIRAULT
Looks like Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift is having trouble raising money. And she may face a primary challenge from Salt Lake City Olympics CEO Mitt Romney, who made an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 1994. Frankly, I think anyone would be better than Swift, whose despicable rejection of Gerald Amirault's parole showed the worst kind of vile political cowardice. Amirault is an innocent man who was convicted of child abuse in the 80's, a victim of Satanic day-care hysteria. Hopefully, her refusal to free Amirault, despite the unanimous consent of the notoriously strict Parole Board, will prove to be yet another political misstep, like her famous use of state office staff for babysitting.
2/27/2002
DAMN, THAT'S FAINT PRAISE
Spike Lee tells USA Today he feels no shame in going to K-Mart. I'm sure the Big K is reassured that the creator of their new $40 million ad campaign doesn't think shopping there makes you a social leper and is even willing to be quoted in print to that effect. What's next?
2/25/2002
POOR DEARS
Hard times for the French as their political and economic influence fades. It would be depressing enough for any nation to fall so fast, but it is worse for the French who have long entertained ridiculously grandiose dreams of world domination:
At least since Charlemagne, French leaders have wished they could mold the Continent in their own image. They still exult in the vision of 19th-century poet and novelist Victor Hugo, who predicted “an extraordinary nation” that “would have as its capital Paris but no longer be called France: it will be called Europe... and in the centuries that follow, still further transformed, it will be called ‘Humanity’.” Ah, the grandeur. With Giscard at the helm, you’d think the French would be feeling good about themselves. In fact, they’re miserable. Rarely in the past 50 years have they faced such a crisis of confidence about their role on the Continent and their place in the world. The intellectual and political elites on both the left and right have published a steady stream of books and articles about France’s “malaise,” its loss of potency, the threat to its very existence. Gloomy Gallic hyperbole aside, there’s ample evidence that France just ain’t what it used to be. One stunning statistic: of 15 members of the European Union, France ranks 12th in per capita income, just ahead of Spain, Portugal and Greece. A decade ago it ranked third, and this kind of slide seemed unthinkable.Maybe they need a testosterone shot. 2/22/2002
L'AFFAIRE AMAZON
The Daily Texan reported yesterday on a very interesting mini-scandal at the Law School. A student was upset with a professor for taking exam questions verbatim from a ExamPro study guide, and, in revenge, he trashed the professor's book in an Amazon.com customer review. To make matters worse, he did not pen the review under his own name, but signed the name of another student in the class. That student complained to Amazon, which removed the review, and notified the Administration. The Dean then sent out an email to all students about the matter, which prompted the offender to confess a few days later.
There's also a controversy over whether the review was racially offensive. The Dean characterized it as such in his school-wide email. The author of the review denies there was any racial undertone, and a Hispanic classmate backs him up. But another student thought it was racist, as did Professor Torres. Amazon has taken down all the customer reviews, so we have no way of judging for ourselves. The book in question, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, co-written with quota-queen Lani Guinier, argues against "color-blind" policies. As a critical race theorist, it may be that Professor Torres is especially sensitive about such matters.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
You might or might not remember MTV VJ Adam Curry. He was a fixture of my adolescence and now offers up beaucoup de stories of many interesting encounters with pop stars. Learn about the guys who Windexed Michael Jackson's pants and Curry's encounter with Boy George at a New Jersey hardware store beauty pageant. Fascinating stuff. He also has a blog, but, then, who doesn't?
FLORIDA TIMES FIFTY
That's what we'd get if we eliminated the electoral college, as some have advocated. Without the EC, in a close presidential race like the 2000, every county in every state in the whole damn country would be subject to the kind of wild vote hunts we saw in Florida. James Edwards explains why it was created and how it preserves our democracy.
GOOD NEWS FOR THE GOP
"ANTI-ISLAM AND A JEW"
Apparently, if you're an Islamic terrorist, that's the only reason you need to slit a man's throat. I'm not actually sure he was even Jewish. Perhaps, for the purposes of those bastards, being American is as good as being a Jew. I'm just glad we did not negotiate with them.
2/20/2002
CIRCUS AT THE HAGUE
The attempt by an international tribunal to bring Slobo to justice is clearly becoming a cruel farce. Yesterday, in his capacity as counsel for himself, he spent three and a half hours "cross-examining" a member of the Kosovo parliament. And he'll get to have the same fun with the next hundred witnesses brought forward by the UN.
2/19/2002
BEYOND THE WONDERBRA
The Wonderbra is a marvel of structural engineering, as Natalija was kind enough to point out to Megan. For too many years, I made the foolish assumption that I didn't, er, need one. Then a few years ago, on a lark, I happened to try one on while shopping. I was amazed! For the first time in my adult life, I had the sort of cinematic-quality décolletage I could only dream about in junior high. Even without the "cookies" that can be inserted within its little pockets, even under a sweat-shirt, it gives great support and a fine silhouette.
Unless, of course, you happen to be sky-diving, or bopping around the International Space Station, or jogging, or doing anything that alters the normal amount and direction of gravitational force applied to ones breasts. Until recently, one had to seek refuge in tightly compressing jogbras and pretend that ones monoboob was sexy. Enter the G-Force! Designed by a sky-divess, this sleek new brassiere "promises a firm round breast in any atmospheric pressure." Woo-hoo! Bring out the Barbarella oufits!
MOVE OVER BARNES AND NOBLE!
VW has built a new kind of "third place" in Dresden. Yes, it's a car factory where you can hang out in swank leather chairs, surf the internet, see an opera, and choose custom interiors for your new luxury Vee-Dub as it is hand-crafted before your eyes. I think Austin needs one.
2/14/2002
STAY, LITTLE SUCKERFISH, STAY!
In case you haven't seen it already, Will Warren has new gems at Unremitting Verse, including a hilarious piscine send-up of My Funny Valentine.
VALENTINE'S DAY AND ITS ENEMIES
Looks like the Indepedent Women's Forum is fighting back against the gender feminist take-over of Saint Valentine's on campus, with an ad urging women to Take Back the Date! and showing a dejected cupid outside of the Vagina Monologues. This is the second ad á la Horowitz that the IWF has offered up to campus newspapers. This one fared better; it was accepted immediately by many Ivy-league schools, and only Penn State expressed concern it "might be too inflammatory" and “might upset some groups on campus.” But when faced with the prospect of bad press coverage, they finally decided to run it.
Meanwhile, Valentine's Day is hated, not just by radical feminists, but by extremists of many kinds. In India, militant Hindus vehemently protested Valentine's Day, burning greeting cards in the street. And our friends the Saudis have officially banned Valentine's Day this year, declaring it to be a "worthless holiday." I guess its feminist uses as a means to fight against patriarchal oppression are lost on them. Still, there is an underground market for Valentines-- amor vincent omnia.
2/13/2002
CHOCOLATE: THE NEW HEALTH FOOD
Just in time for the big day comes news that expensive dark chocolate is good for you. Not only does it contain disease-fighting antioxidants, but its fat is monounsaturated, like olive oil. The current thought is that such fats are necessary for good health (in moderation) because they lower levels of bad cholesterol. Pass me the bonbons!
2/12/2002
MORE ON THE MONOLOGUES
Speaking of Ms. Ensler, I saw the Vagina Monologues performed about a year ago, and found it to be, well, quite difficult to describe adequately. It was kind of like a pudenda pep-rally, where that-of-which-one-ought-to-be-ashamed was very loudly celebrated. (Imagine yourself in a theatre filled with well-dressed women of all ages, though tending towards the mature, chanting proudly, "Cunt! Cunt!") The mostly feminine crowd was rather enthused, to say the least. Parts of the play are funny and sad, but I have to agree with Erik Tarloff that is basically a piece of feminist agitprop without much literary merit. Not that literary merit is often to be discovered in the contemporary theatre, but the play is amazingly over-rated, mainly by people who love it before they even see it. It has a single positive male character and many male rapists. It also depicts a female molester of a thirteen-year-old girl in glowing terms, with her victim later describing the act as "a good rape." Interestingly enough, this character ends up as a bag lady, but the audience must draw conclusions on its own.
Last I checked, this was still America, of course, and Ms. Ensler has every right to espouse whatever sexist views she wishes. I do take issue with her co-option of Valentine's Day for radical feminism, though. I love Valentine's, which to me represents so many of the lovely things in life: champagne, a new dress, dinner on the town, roses, chocolate, and, but, of course, l'amour. Can it be that the "V-Day" enthusiasts have had a few, shall we say, uneventful Valentine's Days and so they now would rather just sit around and moan about their oppression instead? That's a cruel stereotype of feminists, but their anti-romance stance really invites it. You have to wonder if Ensler and her coven actively brainstorm ways to give the impression that they are man-hating harpies. I guess I would be satisfied, if they will just please promise to give Valentine's Day back in 2005, once the lion lays down with the ewe. Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic now.
THE AMERICAN PROSPECT GOES NEGATIVE
Terrific piece by Rich Lowry on the distortions and hypocrisy of the campaign-finance muckrakers:
All this really amounts to what campaign-finance reformers call "mud slinging." That's why I can't understand why McCainiacs and other campaign-finance reformers say they want to raise the level of public discourse, when they so relentlessly run it down by imputing corrupt motives to everyone in Washington.
STEP ONE: SETTING REALISTIC GOALS...
The Times had a profile over the weekend of the mind-boggling Eve Ensler, anti-war activist and prize-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, who has recently decided that violence towards women should be eliminated by 2005. Why not 2004, I wonder? I mean, the sooner the better, right? Perhaps she felt that that shooting for 2004 would be, well, too unrealistic. No sense in attempting the impossible, I guess. Actually, I have no idea what she can be thinking.
Personally, I abhor the idea of violence done to any person, male or female, who is not a terrorist of some sort. And it seems that in this country, at least, rape and domestic violence are decreasing. But human nature is not going to change anytime soon, and humans will continue to do evil and violent things to one another in 2005 and for millennia to come. Even if we eliminated men, which would no doubt be a ghastly and violent ordeal, there would still be domestic violence among lesbians. Woman-on-woman violence is a real problem. Why? Because women are human beings capable of bizarre jealousy and insane rage, just like men. In fact, studies have shown that women tend to be just as violent to their partners as men. What makes male-on-female violence more deadly is the size differential.
2/11/2002
GOVERNOR'S RACE HEATS UP
The race between Tony Sanchez and former Attorney General Dan Morales for the Democratic nomination is getting interesting. One issue has been affirmative action, which Morales opposes. Sanchez has accused Morales of having taken advantage of preferences himself, while trying to prevent others from following him. Now Morales has fired back that race cannot be the sole issue that is considered:
I guess one of the things that makes this point most clearly . . . in my visits and conversations with voters is that the policy which Mr. Sanchez pursues would result in a situation where his children, the children of a billionaire, would receive an automatic preference above the children of a police officer or a laborer or public school teacher in Gilmer, Texas, or Longview, Texas, who happens to be Anglo.This is a point that needs to be made more often, though I don't know how well it will sit with "the base." Bjorn Lomborg has a paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of the Scientific American hitpiece against him on his website. It's funny that they didn't even give him a chance to respond to their attacks and even demanded that he remove their quotes from his response.
RED CROSS CASH-O-RAMA
First, they weren't giving the money to any victims and threatened to spend some of it on a new phone system. Now they're passing it out wily-nilly and regardless of need.
SEMPER FIDELIS?
Is he a Marine first and a Somali warlord second, or the other way around? Hussein Farrah Aidid was a LA suburbanite and Marine reservists before his father's death. Now he carries on the familiy business in exile in Ethiopia. Does he retain any loyalty to America? His former Marine chums think so, but time will tell.
2/8/2002
TELL ME SOMETHING I DON'T KNOW
A study published in the British Medical Journal reveals that over-the-counter cough medicines don't work. I'm on the mend from an awful bout with the flu this week and back at work finally. I tried coming in to work on Wednesday but was sent home because of my hacking cough, which must have been a distraction to my cube-fellows. So much for OTC Robitussin, of which I had drunk long and deep. I finally went to the doctor this morning and scored some Guiatuss AC, the AC standing for Absolutely Codeine-enriched. Tonight I hope to sleep the sleep of the blessed.
REUTERS' OBJECTIVITY WATCH
Here's another odd headline from the folks at Reuter's: LA schools remove vandalized Korans. Read the story and you find nothing about "vandalized" Korans. Rather, in the wake of the September 11th attacks on New York and DC by, er, militants, an Islamic group donated some Koran translations to the LA school district to "promote religious understanding." Problem was the Korans had anti-Semitic comments printed in the footnotes. What's interesting is the first version of this story that came out yesterday doesn't mention any vandalism.
DOGS AND CATS
Mr. Bucher and I have a running dispute about the relative merits of canines and felines. I once argued that no cat had ever selflessly died while saving its owners life, and within the week I had been refuted by some courageous calico. And here it's happened again: Pregnant woman saved from fire by heroic cat (named Smokey).
UPDATE: A home invasion in Philadelphia was recently thwarted by a decidely unpusillanimous pussy cat.
PETA WON'T LIKE THIS, BUT...
As our dependence on foreign oil increases, and Daschle continues to block drilling at home, maybe it's finally time we took a closer look at burning chicken fat.
2/7/2002
NEVER SAY NEVER
We've all done stupid things in our time, but I think few of us can really claim to be as dumb as this Georgia fugitive. Though, at least he's not claiming his evil clone did it.
THANKS, BUT NO THANKS
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW
I know it's a week early to go all mushy on you, but here's an interesting article on the power of love to change the bottom line.
2/6/2002
MORE ON FAUX FIGURES
The DV numbers lampooned below by our Irish friend are truly egregious. Making every man out to be a wife-beater certainly does no favors for the few women who are really in life-threatening relationships. But this kind of do-gooder fun with statistics is all too common. One reason advocacy statistics don't get the scrutiny they so richly deserve is that they tend to confirm the prejudices of their target audiences. Most people wouldn't even know how to go about evaluating a statistical survey if they wanted to. But those who already secretly suspected that Proposition X was true have no motive at all to question the methodology of the research that finally proves it. Often they are all too willing to delude themselves into thinking that the research must be flawless.
A great example of this has been provided by Matt Welch, who did a little Nexis search on mentions of Marc Herold's Afghan civilian casualty stats, lately discredited here and here. An amazing number of them assume that his statistics are conservative estimates, despite the unfortunate fact that they've been shown to exaggerate by a factor of four. They also believe on faith that he must have painstakingly cross-checked the media accounts of civilian deaths to avoid double counting, which is precisely what he didn't do.
Which reminds me of my own reaction to the gender wage gap statistics when I was reminded of them a few years ago in a Women and Public Policy class I took. They were the typical seventy-odd cents on the dollar aggregate figures of female versus male earnings. We were discussing it and everyone was livid, the main question being, "How do they get away with it?" I, myself, was outraged, because I assumed that these figures must take into account things like educational level, time spent outside the workforce, full or part-time status, etc. I remember thinking, so naively, that otherwise it wouldn't really be honest to push non-adjusted figures around if they were really comparing apples to oranges, or, rather, soccer moms with part-time gigs to union guys with overtime.
Well, a year or so later the Independent Women's Forum disabused me of the notion that there was any significant adjusted wage gap. Actually, the National Organization of Women continues to push the non-adjusted numbers in order to make it seem as though women have not made any real progress. And I wonder yet again, "How do they get away with it?"
Apparently, they have some help from liberal members of Congress. Betsy Hart has a revealing account of a conversation Rep. Maloney had with her about the recent GAO report, “Women in Management: Analysis of Selected Data from the Current Population Survey,” which Maloney and Rep. John Dingell renamed, “A New Look Through the Glass Ceiling: Where are the Women?”
She also makes some great points about non-adjusted wage-gap studies and the anti-choice liberals that love them:
The GAO study had several limitations. For instance, it did not control for experience, level of managerial responsibility, or most important, continuous years spent in the workforce. (The Maloney/Dingell analyses in effect dismissed these shortcomings.) Yet, studies which do control for these relevant factors continually show that the wage gap between men and women virtually or totally disappears. In some industries, including once male-dominated ones like architecture, studies show that women earn slightly more than men. The problem for liberals like Maloney and Dingell is that they cannot conceive of women preferring to forgo or cutback careers for a time (or altogether) to care for children, or choosing slower-paced careers at the outset, like pediatrics as opposed to neurosurgery, even when they know this might affect their long-term earnings potential. At best feminists frame the debate as featuring a “choice” women shouldn’t have to make — because it’s a choice feminists don’t want them to make.Something to remember when Equal Pay Day rolls around... Update: Thanks to numerate reader Kate Redmond for pointing out that Herold's figures were off by a "factor" of four, not a "power." Quelle embarrassment!
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE BLARNEY
An Irishman takes a fine stab at misleading statistics on domestic violence towards women and points out a clear double standard:
Moreover, we are told, violence is incipient for some 70 per cent of all women, because of evidence of "controlling behaviour" by their partners. Why? And what is controlling behaviour, anyway? Well, inter alia, we are told that it is limiting a woman's social life, checking on her movements, being personally critical, or keeping her short of money. Ah me, how the head buzzes. So if a woman tries to restrict her husband's excessive social life, if she wants to know what her husband been up to because he's away from home so much, if she criticises his domestic laziness, or if she tries to limit his expenditure on alcohol, are these examples of controlling behaviour? Of course not. For these surveys have a feminist point to make, and they unfailingly make them. 2/5/2002
LOST BOYS
Extreme Ironing World Championships Announced!
I thought I knew something about extreme ironing, having successfully tackled our 100% cotton queen-sized duvet cover week before last. Now I realize if I want to compete internationally, I need to get a really long extension cord, a ticket to Munich, and some all-weather gear.
INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT UNWELCOME AT SMITHSONIAN
According to the Englishman whose fortune founded the Smithsonian, "Every man is a valuable member of society who by his observations, researches, and experiments procures knowledge for men." Sadly, the PC line at the Institution today is that 'only movements and institutions make a difference, not individuals.' A local businesswoman, whose husband runs the American Academy of Achievement, had pledged $38 million to the Smithsonian to create an exhibit on individual achievement. But her proposal caused so much controversy among the apparatchiks of the Institute's bureaucracy, she's now rescinded the pledge.
The curators of the Smithsonian seem to be united against so-called privatization of Institute exhibits, as this Washington Post Magazine piece shows, however the financial realities of museum management require that they seek private donations. And few corporate or private donors are eager to sign on for more projects that continue to ignore the positive aspects of American history. Neither are many members of Congress, which partially explains the Institute's funding problems.
GRAMMAR HAS NEW GLAMOUR
Diagramming sentences is back, as teachers begin to reject the idea that grammar is worthless. Amazingly, a few years ago the National Council of Teachers of English actually published an article in its journal that claimed not only that "in general, the teaching of grammar does not serve any practical purpose for most students," but also that "it does not improve reading, speaking, writing, or even editing, for the majority of students." How are you supposed to know what good language is if no one is willing to teach it to you?
I learned to diagram sentences in college, and can attest that it is great fun. In high school, I received very basic grammar instruction, mostly rote memorization: "A noun is a person, place, or thing." As is probably common among many other people my age, most of what I know about the finer points of English grammar, I learned in the course of studying the grammar of other languages. Many of my mother's college English students come in with next to no knowledge of grammar or spelling, victims of this "whole language" approach that also rejects phonics. She takes it upon herself to teach both, with the idea they are both necessary to good composition.
2/4/2002
OUR EUROPEAN ALLIES:
The always interesting Anne Applebaum of Slate argues that we still need the help of Europe to fight the war against terror. To some extent she is correct. We need their intelligence, we need them to freeze terrorist assets, and most of all, we need them to enforce their own laws against terrorists within their borders.
Applebaum argues against "dumping Europe." The anti-Americanism that has spewed out of European newspapers since September 11th has certainly made getting out of NATO a fun topic to joke about. But I don't think anyone is seriously advocating it. On the other hand, many of the anti-Americans have argued that this new war requires us to bind ourselves even closer to Europe by reconsidering our stances on Kyoto and other rejected treaties. What both these lines of argument ignore is that Europeans, too, need to be safe from terror. After the September attacks in the US, it was revealed that an Al Qeada plot to pump sarin gas in the European Parliament had been foiled. Other attacks against European targets have since been thwarted, as well. Because of the long-term military investments of American taxpayers, we are the only ones with a military capable of waging this war. Thus, isn't it also in their best interest to help us?
UGH. Sorry not to have written in a few days. First, I was trying to write another chapter of the big paper, then I took ill. My Sudafed-addled mind has not been good for much in the way of Intelligent Discourse the past few days. What cerebral activity there has been has been confined to that lower portion of the brain what excels at recognizing great discomfort. I'll not try your patience with a lengthy discription of my ghastly symptoms. I'm not sure I have the strength for it anyway. I promise I'll write lots more once I'm more lucid, should that day ever come again. Now I feel the antihistamine fog returning....
2/1/2002
Charges Expected in Winona Ryder Shoplifting Case
THE RULE OF LAW IS REAFFIRMED! Prosecutors are actually going to file charges against Winona Ryder! Looks like the root causes of her "misunderstanding" with Saks Fifth Avenue continue to be ignored.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Will Wilkinson has a great explaination of why the antiglobalization postmodernist left continues to promote socialism ten years after the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union.
1/31/2002
HERE'S AN INTERESTING HEADLINE in the Washington Post: Groups Find Way to Get Names of INS Detainees. The groups are the ACLU and the American Friends Service Committee. The way that they've found to get the names of the detainees, which General Ashcroft has famously refused to divulge, is to ask the detainees themselves. These groups regularly hold workshops in INS detention centers for those held, as all the detainees are, on immigration charges. These classes are called "Know Your Rights," and the article quotes unnamed authorities as saying they are "powerless" to prevent civil liberties groups from holding legal presentations in INS facilities to any detainee who would like to come.
1/28/2002
BEFORE I GO WRITE ABOUT MARKET-BASED ALTERNATIVES TO THIRD PARTY REIMBURSEMENT STRUCTURES
BEFORE I GO WRITE ABOUT MARKET-BASED ALTERNATIVES TO THIRD PARTY REIMBURSEMENT STRUCTURES: Let me mention the excellent novel Loose Lips by Claire Berlinski. I liked the first chapter so much, I bought the rest! Very funny and smart writing. Yet another thing to keep me from writing the thesis. Damn that clever Berlinski woman! I may not blog much for the next day or so, so go read her novel instead.
UPDATE: Looks like Claire has had some success with her web publishing strategy, so much so that it is now only available in a future dead-tree version. Look for it soon at your local book seller soon!
TESTING BLOGGER PRO....
TESTING BLOGGER PRO.... Seems to be just what I wanted, as if Ev somehow searched my heart for its deepest Blogger desires. This has been a week of updates and downgrades. This weekend I upgraded to Palm OS 4, needlessly, I now realize, as it did not contain the mail conduit I had thought it would. I console myself with the $40 new memo pad alarm thingy, which I can now use to bombard myself with handwritten reminders: Write thesis! Drink a liter of water! Blog, dammit!
I also finally removed the Palm Desktop OS X Beta from my Mac as it is vile crap. Forget about the "Megahertz Myth" myth, I want Steve Jobs drawn and quartered for letting Palm claim at MacWorld that they have a beta product that will Hotsync under OS X! Oh, villainous lie! So I'm back to 2.6.3, but at least the serial-to-USB converter works again. Maybe someday the planets will align and I'll figure out the voodoo required to be able to reliably Hotsync through IrDA. I'm not going to try any more OS X betas, though, I'll tell you what.
That said, the gorgeous new Office suite for OS X is fully out and, thanks to a dark pact UT made with Microsoft, I was able to get a disc in my grubby little paw this afternoon for $5. Now, sadly, I have exactly zero reasons not to finish my thesis. My exceedingly lame final excuse, "But I have to go into the Classic environment to use Word..." has now been punctured by the "stunning" Word X. Oh, well, it probably won't kill me to go write a bit of it.
HEAR, HERE!
HEAR, HERE! The National Post is dead-on with this editorial about the dangers of applying the Geneva Convention to those who do not obey the rules of war:
Parcelling out Geneva Convention rights to unlawful combatants is nothing akin to sending food and medical aid to the Afghan populace. It is reward for gross wrongdoing. If covert operators, terrorists, are given Geneva protections, the Convention will be eroded; its core purpose is to persuade combatants to fight by the rules. If the privileges come irrespective of wholesale and flagrant rule-breaking, what incentive is there for combatants to behave in prescribed ways? If you reward criminal mass murder, that is what you are likely to get. Mr. Powell suggests that U.S. soldiers captured in some future conflict might, in revenge, be denied their rights under the Geneva Convention as well. That may be true -- indeed it would be absurdly naive to expect Geneva Convention standards from al-Qaeda jailers -- but it is beside the point. Pre-emptively capitulating on principle for fear of what the enemy might do is appeasement and the road to weakness, equivocation and defeat. Since the Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners enjoy decent food, clothing and medical treatment, the only practical implication of providing them with Geneva rights would be to circumscribe their interrogation. Intelligence is the single most important commodity in the fight against terrorism, and it would be culpable folly to relinquish the right to get it. We do not need to know the terrorists' names, ranks, ages and serial numbers -- they probably have several of the first and are uncertain of the rest -- but we do need to know what they know about further attacks on the West. The prisoners likely know of plots and organizational detail, yet Mr. Powell's suggestion would prevent U.S. officials from even asking about them.I don't think Powell can really be serious about calling them POWs. Maybe he's just playing "good cop." He certainly knows that American prisoners of war are never given their rights under the Geneva Convention by anyone. 1/26/2002
THINGS I WISH I DIDN'T KNOW: Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor dated each other in college. Now you know it as well. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
1/25/2002
GOD BLESS TINY TIM! Cavanaugh has provoked Unremitting Verse's Will Warren to new heights of wit and wicked cleverness, and we're all better off for it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, eat your heart out! I won't spoil any of the fun by attempting to excerpt it. I'll just say, click as fast as you can, you won't want to miss this one!
1/24/2002
HAS BLOGGING CHANGED JOURNALISM? Well, take a look at National Review Online's new blog, The Corner. It's fantastic!
1/23/2002
POOR MARK MORFORD. The Idaho town where he vacations when not living in San Francisco has both a Wal-Mart and a Kmart, and it seems to be more than his fragile soul can bear. Where someone made of stronger stuff, say, a person like myself, might see not just one, but two convenient places to pay less for more, Morford sees "[s]creaming bright perky inescapable American detritus" and "overlit voids of headache-inducing lowbrow goods."
Ah, that explains why some fellow shoppers dropped to their knees, clutching their skulls with howls of pain as we crossed the Wal-Mart threshold. "The goods!" they yelped, "They're not even middle-brow! Sweet! Baby! Jesus! Make! The! Pain! Stop!" Yeah, I was wondering about that.
Here are two things about Wal-Mart and life that Morford doesn't seem to grasp. First, most Americans don't consider themselves rich and some are actually truly poor. Either way, they don't want to pay a dollar more than they have to for anything. Second, there's nothing wrong with the quality of most Wal-Mart goods. I'd like to know where exactly he buys his high-brow toilet paper. Perhaps he frequents some TP boutique in Union Square. For the rest of us, Charmin' is easy on the hiney and cheapest at Wal-Mart. That's good enough for me and for most of America.
I am often frankly dazzled at the array of attractive dry goods available at Wal-Mart. Not everything mind you, but plenty if you look. I mentioned the wooden trouser clamps yesterday. A few weeks ago I bought a very nice pine and canvas folding laundry hamper at Wal-Mart and then saw its twin at Linens N' Things for twice the price. $12 is a quarter of a bottle of single-malt!
The rich of every age have been able to accumulate fine goods. What is so wrong exactly with the poor being able to do the same now? What is so distasteful about a country whose prosperity allows its common workers to live "a life that would have made the Sun King blink," as Tom Wolfe put it in Hooking Up? Even if the masses are buying, don't faint now, lowbrow goods, why is that such a burr in Mark Morford's bum? Does he think everyone should shop at Pottery Barn? He disdains Tarjay's "faux-upscale... formula," but I bet he scowls just as viciously at Restoration Hardware shoppers. You get the feeling that nothing short of a meal of grass in North Korea would make the guy happy. There's only one way to find out. Maybe he could start vacationing there and leave the good Wal-Marts of Idaho alone.
ENRON ROUNDUP: Michael Granof, the man who taught me the meaning of FASB, has a nice piece in the NYT today on Congress' obstruction of accounting standards reform and its role in the Enron debacle, Unaccountable in Washington. Dr. Granof made governmental accounting interesting, if you can believe that, not least of all by convincing us wholeheartedly of the dangers of financial shenanigans.
This Forbes.com article explains how Enron used its own creative accounting standards to overvalue its revenues to such a degree that it was billed as the 7th largest company in the US. It also suggests that FASB neglected its responsiblities as much as it was thwarted by Congress in fulfilling them. Also, Michael W. Lynch has a great summary in Reason of the central issues in the scandal thus far.
QUESTIONS OF PROPORTION: Last week, Steven Den Beste commented on the common European grouse that America does not send the same proportion of its GDP in foreign aid that some European nations do. We send twice as much aid money as France, bien sûr, but our pie is more than twice as big as the French tarte. The intimation is that somehow we are stingy. He identified a lot of ways the US aids the rest of the world that aren't considered traditional aid. Now Andrew Hofer cleverly points out the huge sums of private money doled out by Americans to the rest of the world. The difference is that this money is given voluntarily, not wrenched from someone's wallet and distributed to the masses by the US Government.
1/22/2002
WHO DOESN'T LOVE a good war movie? Last night we watched "Patton" again. Mr. Bucher was in some pain of a dental nature and we were almost out of Scotch. So I went out and bought something rather smooth and old to ease his sorrow. Can there be anything more delicious than the smell of good Scotch? It's like a combination of all the good smells in the world married together. It makes me wish my nose was bigger and my gullet more swift.
As is our custom when there is a new bottle of Scotch in the house, we watched "Patton." We drink only a wee bit of it now and again, because it is so dear and because we're not dutiful drunks. Thus, it had been a while since my last run to Wiggie's, and, in the meantime, I had forgotten how good Scott's opening scene is. Here's an excerpt, appropriately enough from manlyweb.com:
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men. Yes, every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they ARE He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen.I wish that I had thought of reading this a few months ago. There's a lot more, so go read it. The above passage reminds me of my favorite Hemingway quote, from A Farewell to Arms: A brave man dies perhaps two thousand time if he's intelligent, he just doesn't mention it. TWO THUMBS UP, WAY UP!: Iain Murray points out a brilliant new blogger, Will Warren, who blogs in verse. Here's one of the many jewels on his site, Unremitting Verse:
If My Grocery Store Wrote Me |
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 | I was just sending my brother, who is in the 101st Airborne Division, an Amazon gift certificate when I found this great way to say thanks to one of the fine men and women who are making everything possible overseas. Let them know how much their service and sacrifice means to all of us. Give them something to read when they're not dropping those fabulous daisy cutters. |
12/17/2001
A NEW LOW IN FISKISM. Leave it to the BBC to come up with the root causes of baby rape in South Africa. It's all due to apartheid, you see. Apparently people in the Third World can't really be blamed even when they commit the most obviously heinous acts.
Mark Steyn points out brilliantly how racist this attitude really is:
Every argument the enlightened antiwar progressives make has at its core the proposition that these people are primitives: They are no more culpable for tearing you apart than a pack of hyenas would be. As Mr. Fisk sees it, the mob who mugged him and robbed him were "truly innocent of any crime except being the victim of the world." Not true. They had a choice, and to deny that they had a choice is to dehumanize them far more than Pentagon euphemisms about "collateral damage" do. Before the scenes of shaven Afghans cheering their liberation disheartened the peaceniks, you could go to most any college town and see signs saying "Stop your racist war!" As they no longer seem to need the placards, I was wondering if we warmongers could borrow them. Because the intellectual assault being waged by the extreme left is explicitly racist. To old-school imperialists, these excitable Pashtun types were the "lesser breeds without the law" (Kipling). To self-loathing multiculturalists, they still are.
I'M BACK FOR A BIT. Was in Baytown visiting the folks this weekend. A spanking new strip mall seems to have sprung up there everytime I visit. Strip malls are so underappreciated. It is far better to have a Ross and an Outback Steakhouse than to have an empty pasture. Anyone who thinks differently should have to live for a year in a small Texas town without a Wal-Mart.
Luckily there's room for many more. They still don't have a Garden Ridge or a CostCo. I say, bring on the cheap goods and jobs! And poor little Baytown is the town that Starbucks forgot. Are you listening, Seattle? Somebody make my father a happy man.
12/14/2001
HILARIOUS treatment of the Winona Ryder shoplifting scandal by Andrew Hofer at More Than Zero. A magnificent tour de force of satire. Watch out Onion guys!
12/13/2001
LBJ AFFIRMATIVE ACTION DEBATE UPDATE: Since last night's posting, there have been exactly zero responses to the posting I posted here. None of them have come from me. As he said, the debate rages on. There are many possible reasons for the lack of discussion, not least of which is the fact that exams are on and everyone's exhausted. Some people also don't believe that the listserv is an appropriate place for debate. Still, I can count on one finger the number of anti-racial preferences postings I've seen there. It wasn't me, either, but a foreign student from Central America.
I should admit that my first year in the program there was an organized public debate on affirmative action between some students. The anti-AA side, half of which was of color, ended up arguing from some sort of wacky critical race theory perspective, the details of which escape my memory. All I remember was that they routed the other side, which I seem to recall was completely of color, but appeared to be a stranger to critical race theory. I'm certainly not suggesting that that's a bad thing.
This wasn't merely the only debate on affirmative action I've seen here in three and a half years, but the only debate period. I'm pretty sure it came to pass solely through the efforts of one of the few conservative students there.
HERE'S WHY I BLOG: Reason A, at least. It keeps me off the LBJ School listserv, where I've gotten in some trouble on more than one occasion. Read the most recent provocation, from a student whose name I won't print, received last night:
To: lbjstudents@lists.cc.utexas.edu, lbjfaculty@lists.cc.utexas.edu, lbjstaff@lists.cc.utexas.edu Subject: University of GA Lawsuits Settled: Affirmative Action Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 19:55:07 -0600 Below you will find an article about the ailing state of affirmative action in our educational institutions. Perhaps one of the most pressing public policy issues surrounding higher education today, I encourage each of you to read along and formulate your own opinions. My money is on the fact that this will be another "Hopwood-like" situation where thousands of minority and low-income applicants will be shut out of more prestigious institutions for the sake of so-called "equity." Needless to say, I find nothing equitable in this. The debate rages on...Except there is no debate at LBJ. I can only imagine what hell might break loose if some one were to actually try to debate this kind of touchy subject on the listserv. And anyway, what kind of debate can you have with someone who finds "nothing equitable" in the equal treatment of all races? Who views not accepting underqualified minorities as "shutting them out"? Here's the message he was forwarding. Notice that Georgia is eliminating ALL preferences including legacies. This complete focus on academic achievement alone seems supremely fair to me. That's just me, though.
-----Original Message----- From: TRIO Program Educators [mailto:TRIO@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU] On Behalf Of Kimberly Washington-Pearse Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 7:41 PM To: TRIO@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU Subject: University of GA Lawsuits Settled fyi... University of Georgia Lawsuits Settled Written by: Christopher Just Following four years of litigation, the University of Georgia's (UGA) affirmative action admissions policies effectively ended Friday, November 30, 2001. Precipitated by an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, in early November, that UGA's admissions process granted preference to minority applicants while doing little to increase diversity, university officials agreed to extend an offer of admission to the final plaintiff. University officials decided not to challenge the circuit court ruling, which would have required appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ending the use of a "Total Student Index" to review the applications of 10-20 percent of the applicant pool, UGA officials say that all students will be reviewed strictly on GPA and standardized test scores. Student's GPA will be reviewed on the basis of their grades in 16 core courses, which will make up two-thirds of the decision. Standardized test scores will make up the remaining third. The change in admission policy means that no non-academic factors will be used, including, gender, socioeconomic status, geographical residency and legacy status. "Technically, what the 11th Circuit told us was not that race has no place among the many factors that can be considered in admissions decisions, but that our weighting system was out of compliance with federal law," wrote university President Michael F. Adams, in a statement released November 29, 2001. This statement has lead some to believe that once the university has had time to review its options the admission process could be altered again in 2003 to take race into consideration as a limited factor.
12/11/2001
TONIGHT ON O'REILLY, one of my favorite LBJ profs, Bob Auerbach, a one-man crusade against Alan Greenspan. I'm thinking he'll get on well with Mr. Bill, who, as Fox Fans know, is just looking after the folks, as the powerful protect themselves. Since I may be the only person in this building who watches the Factor on a very regular basis, I tried to give Bob some tips. I advised him to answer all questions and push Greenspan's interest rate hikes as the economy crumbled last year. Which is probably what he was going to talk about anyway. I tried to reassure him that not everyone gets torn into pieces. If O'Reilly agrees with you, he'll just tell you you're a good American.
When I agree with O'Reilly, I just think he's being a good American. This happens more often than it doesn't. When I disagree with O'Reilly, I tend to think he is just saying stuff to appear to be more moderate than he actually is. He wants to be able to position himself as a centrist. (Just the other night he got some Jesse Jackson flunky to agree that the Factor was not conservatively biased, in contrast to the rest of Fox News.) I guess what this means is that deep down, I believe that Bill O'Reilly really agrees with me about everything, but won't always admit it on TV. What a strange thing to think.
TUVALU UPDATE in Tech Central Station. Also some nice swipes at Lester Brown, the Malthusian head of the Earth Policy Institute, whose goal is to create an 'eco-economy'. How do we do this? Brown suggests "a restructuring of the tax system that will simultaneously reduce income taxes and raise taxes on environmentally destructive activities." This is your typical green economic thinking. Sorry, Lester, but if you raise taxes too high on 'environmentally destructive activities' such as factory production or generating electricity for computers, no one's going to have any income to tax, anyway.
Here's one of their eco-updates from November 23rd, World Grain Harvest Falling Short by 54 Million Tons. One of the reasons they give for the supposed short-fall of grain production this year and last is "low grain prices." Clearly if there is a real grain shortage, this will cease to be a problem.
12/10/2001
WHAT? BONO WRONG? William Easterly has a thought provoking article in Foreign Policy Magazine about Third World debt relief. The issue that brings together the Pope, Mr Vox ,and Senator Helms is taken as a no-brainer by many. However, Easterly has some great reasons why it may not be the panacea for poor countries it might seem. Here's two fine points:
Debt relief advocates should remember that poor people don't owe foreign debt—their governments do. Poor nations suffer poverty not because of high debt burdens but because spendthrift governments constantly seek to redistribute the existing economic pie to privileged political élites rather than try to make the pie grow larger through sound economic policies. The debt-burdened government of Kenya managed to find enough money to reward President Moi's home region with the Eldoret International Airport in 1996, a facility that almost nobody uses. Left to themselves, bad governments are likely to engage in new borrowing to replace the forgiven loans, so the debt burden wouldn't fall in the end anyway. And even if irresponsible governments do not run up new debts, they could always finance their redistributive ways by running down government assets (like oil and minerals), leaving future generations condemned to the same overall debt burden. Ultimately, debt relief will only help reduce debt burdens if government policies make a true shift away from redistributive politics and toward a focus on economic development.
THAT SINKING FEELING: Andrew Hofer did a good job of pointing out some of the reasons why the Pacific island of Tuvalu will have a hard time in court proving that US SUV usage caused the sea to swallow it up. I would add one minor point to his argument: It's not sinking! As was documented in the October 26th issue of Science magazine, Tuvalu has experienced falling sea levels for 50 years now and this is predicted to continue. (NOTE: Unfortunately Science is not available online for free, but I was able to access it from UT and can confirm that the article I'm linking to, from the pro-CO2 site, The Greening Earth Society is correctly quoting the journal and accurately reproducing their images. They are indeed funded by electric companies, but that doesn't mean everything they say is a lie.)
It seems that the scientists have scared the people of Tuvalu into thinking that global warming will sink them, but as The CIA World Factbook -- Tuvalu makes clear, many of their environmental problems have been caused by their own poor stewardship, which has exacerbated the ill-suitability of the island for human habitation (emphasis mine):
Environment - current issues: since there are no streams or rivers and groundwater is not potable, most water needs must be met by catchment systems with storage facilities (the Japanese Government has built one desalination plant and plans to build one other); beachhead erosion because of the use of sand for building materials; excessive clearance of forest undergrowth for use as fuel; damage to coral reefs from the spread of the Crown of Thorns starfish; Tuvalu is very concerned about global increases in greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on rising sea levels, which threaten the country's underground water table.The scientific evidence for falling sea levels, when so many scientists have told Tuvalu they are sinking has left their prime minister confused, according to the Tuvalu News
TUVALU PM ADMITS CONFUSION OVER CONFLICTING REPORTS ON SEA LEVELS FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu (February 24, 2000 ? Radio Australia)---Tuvalu Prime Minister Ionatana Ionatana admits he is confused by conflicting reports about sea levels surrounding Tuvalu. Tuvalu is a low-lying island nation which has been experiencing abnormally high spring tides in recent years, which Tuvaluans believe will eventually force them to evacuate to another country. But Prime Minister Ionatana said scientists who have been monitoring sea levels since 1980 say Tuvalu's sea levels have been falling and not rising. "Scientists have confused us. "The Australian government has recently told us from the facts, from the figures, that these tide gauges have provided to Flinders University that there is not going to be a sea rise in the immediate future for Tuvalu. It has been noticed that the sea is falling," he said. "So here we are with the situation. We are threatened by rising sea levels and here are these tide gauges telling us there is no sea rise. There is likely to be a sea level fall. "Now where do we stand here?"I would hopefully guess that they stand not to gain from frivolous environmental torts.
12/9/2001
FISH IN A BARREL: Hey, try to guess which comment on the 'Abdul Hamid' article below belongs to my dear husband, the indymedia troll.
GUYS! GUYS! YOU HAVE IT ALL WRONG: Yeah, as Ken Layne, Moira Breen, Little Green Footballs, Matt Welch, Steven Den Beste, Fevered Rants, Andrew Sullivan, and Damian Penny have all misguidedly reported, the San Francisico Chronicle piece on our American Taliban was ill-conceived. What my fellow warboggers have failed to grasp, though, overly-wedded as they are to logic and common decency, is that Freedberg didn't go nearly far enough to praise Walker's parents. The patriots at indymedia.org don't think it would be right to just let him go. Why, the boy's a freakin' hero!
AWARD ABDUL HAMID [JOHN WALKER] THE MEDAL OF HONOR Abdul Hamid (John Walker), the convert to Islam from the US who joined the Taliban, is the ONLY American in Afghanistan who has shown gallantry and courage in the face of danger. When the history of this conflict is written (assuming it doesn't end in terminal world war) the name of John Walker will be writ large in its annals of heroism. (article 1) Abdul Hamid (John Walker), the convert to Islam from the US who joined the Taliban, is the ONLY American in Afghanistan who has shown gallantry and courage in the face of danger. After fighting the US terrorists and Bush regime stooges, Walker withstood the infamous basement siege by Bush-backed terrorists that included (1) tossing bombs in it; (2) burning alive with diesel fuel; (3) attempted drowning by flooding the basement (4) starvation for 10 days. Through it all he was not the least bit intimidated and remained defiant in the face of CIA war criminals. And that's documented on film. Walker is on the right side in this conflict and his actions have gone far above and beyond the call of duty. When the history of this conflict is written (assuming it doesn't end in terminal world war) the name of John Walker will be writ large in its annals of heroism. He stands for what America SHOULD be all about. The terms of the Medal of Honor are "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity of the risk of loss of life, above and beyond the call of duty in action involving actual confict with an an opposing armed force." John Walker has met, indeed exceeded those requirements. The Movement to Award John Walker the Medal of Honor calls for Abdul Hamid - John Walker to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. And encourages everyone else to support this. As for the scumbag cowards who specialize in bombing civilians from 60,000 feet using electronics - well, piss on them.The Taliban are known for their "gallantry" towards women, of course. I wonder how many women Johnny Walker beat for wearing white socks. Yes, let us not stop with giving Walker the Medal of Honor. Surely it's not to late to also give it posthumously to Jefferson Davis or the Desert Fox.
12/7/2001
A CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR LAZY BLOGGERS from Andrew Hofer: The More Than Zero Bullpen. No longer do we have to toil at our monitors searching for good material. Andrew's doing the dirty work for us! Just pick among the gems and blog away, my friends. Now if he could just do some of my Christmas shopping...
12/6/2001
SMART WOMAN, DUMB CRIMINAL: Humorous story in the The Patriot-News about a book shop clerk who presented a would-be robber with a very compelling reason why she wouldn't open her cash register. Erin Moul recounts her story:
Finally, she said, the man came around the back of the counter -- as she backed away toward her purse -- and he said, "I need you to open the cash register." "I was like, 'I don't think so!'" Moul recalled. She said that when the man repeated his demand, she replied: "No. And I have a really good reason not to open my register. You want to see why?' "So I pulled out my 9mm and I said, 'Here's why.'" "I held it up and showed it to him," Moul said, demonstrating by pointing the weapon -- which she said was loaded at the time of the attempted robbery -- at the ceiling. "Then I said, 'Why don't you try robbing somebody who doesn't have a gun?' "That just freaked him out," said Moul, who has a permit to carry her pistol. "He apologized. He said, 'I'm sorry. Some of my friends put me up to this.'"It's a funny story, which is put in better perspective by this very sad story of what happened to a New York baby store employee whose purse contained only her wallet.
TEMPLATE CHANGES GALORE! Yes, I spent far too much time mucking about yesterday with styles and tables and even Blogger XML. And I'm sure I've forgotten someone still. But there you have a little gender-revealing photo taken just after eating Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, that look of bliss is the tryptophan kicking in.
Oh, and as Thomas Nephew has been so kind as to note, it's Mrs. Bucher, not Mizz. At the risk of sounding immodest, it's actually Mrs. William A. Bucher. As you might guess, I'm not among the American women as eager to take their husband's name as they are to assume the chador. I don't feel oppressed to bear my husband's family's name anymore than I felt oppressed to wear my grandfather's surname. My maiden name has now happily displaced my former middle name. Our culture is what it is, and I find the solutions to patrilineal naming more unfair or simply confusing than the current tradition. This way we don't have to wait in separate lines to clear customs. And besides, who could resist the chance to be named Bucher, as in die Bucher, books!
12/5/2001
SCHEER MADNESS: Breaking new ground in his debut column in The Nation, Robert Scheer argues that the Soviet Union was very, very evil. So very evil that it's ridiculous, really, to claim that Osama bin Laden represents any new level of evil, justifying a new level of curtailment. As Scheer asks,
if the Soviets were not also enemies of civilization, why did Ronald Reagan define them as the "Evil Empire"? Why did his CIA arm Muslim fanatics to wage holy war against godless communism in Afghanistan? If the Soviet leaders were not into "radical evil," why did Reagan insist that we build missile defenses against an enemy he claimed was serious about initiating and winning a nuclear war, despite the inevitable destruction of all modern life? The argument was that Russian communists, like Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban communists, did not value human life.What can we expect next, Katha Pollitt arguing that Paula Jones got a raw deal? Has Scheer been watching Fox News? Never fear, this is not a sign of a radical shift in Nation-al policy. It's just Scheer's bizarre way of setting up a dismissal of all the totalitarian threats we've faced since the Second World War. For if Al-Qeada is no more evil than the Soviet Union, and only a fool like Reagan would think the Worker's Paradise an "evil empire," then really we have nothing to fear from radical Islamic militants. And obviously no extra precautions need to be taken to stop them. Quod erat demonstrandum. But Scheer is quite wrong to think Osama bin Laden no worse than the Soviet Union. The Soviets did not respect the lives of millions of people, the record on this is quite plain, but they did respect their own lives very much. It is this Russian rationality which made the system of mutually assured destruction work. It will not work, however, against people who want to be sent to the sloe-eyed virgins ASAP. The rest of Scheer's column is a lecture on the complexity of evil, where we are instructed that evil cannot be killed with a stick. He also seems to suggest, strangely, that we should take a more Christian attitude towards the Muslim fanatics who wish to destroy us. Terrorists can be redeemed, it seems. Scheer points to Yasser Arrafat and Gerry Adams, among others, who he informs us were "once associated with 'terrorism'." Hmm. Is that right? Good thing they've completely renounced it, else the peace process in the Middle East and Northern Ireland wouldn't be going so smashingly well.
12/4/2001
GREAT NEW LINKS! Let me know what I've missed. Also, check out the food links, including the Open Line Bulletin. I was looking for my grandmother's German fruitcake recipe last night. I wrote it in the back of a cookbook at some point and I was wracking my skull to figure out which one and where it might be. I realize many people suffer from fruitcake prejudice, but this cake is really good. The difference is that it's made with preserves, not candied fruit. Anyway, I finally gave up and did a google search for "german fruitcake preserves" and there it was in the Best of the Open Line Bulletin January 1974. Apparently, the OLB is a call-in radio recipe show that has online archives going back to 1963. We're talking recipes for all manner of Jello molds, Thousand Island Dressing Liver, Gum Drop Salad, and many other delicacies lately to be found only in the Gallery. Plus some really tasty sounding items as well and very interesting household hints, like how to make your own wallpaper paste and use hairspray to keep silver from tarnishing.
I love this stuff even though I never do any of it. I'm convinced that the whole Martha Stewart industry is pure homemaking pornography. Think about it. It's a bunch of stuff that looks really cool, and which you like to think about yourself doing at some point, but it's probably not going to happen.
AMERICAN TALIBAN UPDATE: Great piece in the Weekly Standard about The Boy Who Loved bin Laden. Upon learning that our friend, "Abdul" supported terrorist attacks on the USS Cole and the WTC, it's clear to me he knew exactly what he was doing. So, I'm once again in complete agreement with "The Best."
12/3/2001
THEY DON'T GET IT. Interesting piece in the NYT about the tremendous success Fox News has had since September 11th. While the other network journalists fret about whether wearing a flag pin makes them Ashcroft's bitch, Fox reporters and commentators who openly voice their support of the United States war effort have been rewarded with increased market share and great ratings. The reason is that Americans are sick of moral equivalency. We can tell a terrorist from a freedom fighter and worry about anyone who can't. What journalists in a tizzy about covering the war in an "objective manner" do not grasp is that it is an objective fact that Osama bin Laden is an evil hatemonger and the Taliban were lying theocratic tyrants. It should be no wonder that at such a critical time in the nation's history, Americans are seeking out new outlets that tell the truth.
A REAL AMERICAN TALIBAN ‘He’s a really good boy’ says the mom of the 20-year-old American captured in the Mazar-e-Sharif prison riot. Steven Den Beste believes the convert to Islam should be tried for treason for fighting in an army at war with the US. I have little sympathy for this idiot, but I wonder if it matters when he volunteered. It makes a big difference to me if someone signs up for the other side after war has been declared. I think he was already fighting with the Taliban on September 11th, in which case it might have been very dangerous to desert. Not as dangerous, perhaps, as staying in the Taliban. But I'm not sure if he is actually a traitor to his country.
Of course, he is obviously a traitor to our way of life. How could he stomach their treatment of women, after being brought up in Northern California by a Buddhist mother? Or the killing of civilians by the Taliban? Unlike many of the Pakistanis he was fighting with, he's not illiterate and he was brought up in a civil society. How could he reject all that to go make war on his fellow Muslims in Afghanistan? I think he should share the fate of the other Taliban prisoners, whatever that is.
12/2/2001
HOLIDAY GOODIES This weekend I've been making my holiday gameplan-- the cards, the gifts, the treats. It has kept me from blogging much, but hopefully it will prevent a small nervous breakdown later this month. Planning is the only way to stay sane during "the most wonderful time of the year." Well, I must admit there is also the bah, humbug option of non-acknowledgement of holiday obligations. This is what my adorable husband does and it seems to work for him, as well.
Yesterday, I found a wonderful repository of holiday recipes at christmas.allrecipes.com. One delicacy was particularly intriguing. The name says it all: Saltine Toffee Cookies. Described as "an easy to make but wonderfully delicious treat," they are made by mixing together melted butter and brown sugar and then pouring it over, you guessed it, saltine crackers. These are then baked and topped with chocolate chips and nuts. It does sound delightfully easy. But does it belong in the Gallery of Regrettable Food? I can think of but one way to know for sure, and I'll let you know how they turn out.
Coming soon--food links and additional fantastic warblogs!
11/30/2001
DOCTOR BLACK STRIKES BACK: One of my favorite professors at LBJ, Bill Black, has surfaced in the Letters sections of various Middle Eastern newspapers with some strong words for anti-American and anti-Semitic journalists. I particularly like this part of his letter to The Middle Eastern Times:
Read the whole thing; it's all good stuff. Bill is a genuine American hero for his valiant investigation of the S&L Debacle. As Charles Keating found and any of his past PFM/PAM students can attest, he can also be a terrifying adversary.
PROUD TO BE HATED BY THOSE WHO HATE AMERICA I noted that Khan erred in believing that Americans could not understand why we were hated by so many in the Middle East. We know full well that we are hated, but we think Khan is wrong as to why we are hated. We believe that the reasons we are hated reflect well on our society and nation. We have a saying that a man's character can be judged not simply by his friends, but by his enemies. The British hated my Irish ancestors: that reflected badly on the Brits, and well on the Irish. Who hates America with the greatest passion? Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, the most anti-democratic and bigoted Iranian leaders, and people who rejoice at the mass murder of innocent women and children.(Via Bjorn Staerk)
Read the whole thing; it's all good stuff. Bill is a genuine American hero for his valiant investigation of the S&L Debacle. As Charles Keating found and any of his past PFM/PAM students can attest, he can also be a terrifying adversary.
NO MORE YELLOW TURBANS FOR AFGHAN HINDUS reports The Times of India. Under the Taliban, Hindus and Sikhs were forced to single themselves out by their headgear "for their own protection." The Northern Alliance has put a stop to this and now Hindu women are allowed to wear brightly-colored saris outside again.
CLONING: I'm glad to see Glenn Reynolds has offered a better explanation of why he opposes those who are against cloning than that they are "stupid" and "pro-death." I'm still not entirely convinced that therapeutic cloning does not involve the instrumental use of human life, though. Professor Reynolds says that no one has offered him a reason why these early embryos are human beings, only feelings that they are. But, he also doesn't offer us a reason why they are not human beings, only a feeling that they aren't. The main reason I think they may be human beings is that I am a human being and I began as an early embryo. In contrast, I was not once a skin cell. If these embryos are not human beings, what exactly are they? Because of their DNA, they must be classified as human. Because of their great potential to become people like you or me, I have severe moral reservations about destroying them to potentially save someone else's life at some time in the future. Especially since using ones own stem cells, of which scientists have recently been able to isolate millions from our most plentiful national resource-- the fat on our toushies, obviates this need to clone oneself to get stem cells.
Professor Reynolds also argues that if destroying these embryos is the same as abortion, then God must be the greatest abortionist, since so many of these die before reaching full term. I'm not really sure how destroying an embryo in a petri-dish is any different than destroying it in utero. Again, he doesn't explain the difference, but just offers a familiar argument for the morality of abortion. We've all heard it before, but the judgment of God on most embryos justifies neither abortion nor stem cell harvesting. God is also the greatest murderer of nonagenarians, but that doesn't make it moral to kill them for their parts.
I say all this as someone who believes, as Clinton claimed to once, that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. I worry that taking this road offered by therapeutic cloning advocates (TCAs) will make what is, in essence, abortion, tremendously common. In fact, in the Reason article Professor Reynolds points us to, Dr. Bailey says that he hopes one day everyone has a cloned embryo of himself waiting in the wings should one take ill.
And what is being suggested right now are the worst sorts of abortions, in my view, those of pure convenience. For there is currently only the potential to save lives, which surely is different than actually saving a life. I feel the same sort of discomfort with the intentional creation and then destruction of these embryos as I did in another situation. An acquaintance of mine announced to everyone that she and her husband had successfully conceived a child and we were all very happy for them. Then a couple of months later, she decided that this was a bad time in her social work career to have a child and announced in her second trimester that she was having a D&C.; Frankly, the fact that the terminated pregnancy had been planned made me very sad and queasy. I can only imagine what her in-laws must have felt, if they were even told the truth about it. Yes, these are "only" feelings, but aren't our feelings the very basis of our moral sense of things? Don't we simply "feel" things are right or wrong in our gut or our hearts more often than we construct complicated ethical arguments for and against?
I realize that TCAs "feel" that a human life is not being taken when a 100-cell blastocyst is destroyed, but I worry that it will not stop there. What is the difference between an early embryo and a later one? At what point do you say this one is too advanced to be destroyed for its cells or proto-organs, but this one can go? Scientists have been working on alternatives to uterine development for some time now, and I think TCAs dismiss the fears of so-called "fetal-farms" all too quickly. It is reassuring that they believe that the idea is too horrible to be a valid possibility. But what is to stop this kind of mad science? I don't think any of the arguments for using 100-cell embryos preclude the use of more developed fetuses. And unfortunately many of the conditions for personhood, such as self-awareness and advanced cognition, which are used as examples of why an embryo is not a human being would also not apply to one-day-old humans. Anyone who's ever spent time with a newborn knows that, while they are adorable to us, probably because we are hard-wired to think them so, they honestly haven't the ability to love or reason as well as a three-year-old dog.
TCAs scoff at these fears of a slippery slope towards mass abuse of clones, but haven't we already seen a slippery slope toward embryonic experimentation? The creation of human embryos for scientific experimentation was once morally unthinkable to many people, and for this reason, it was banned in federally-funded research by President Clinton. Now, some people have been convinced there is no moral problem with it-- or more troubling, have been convinced that whatever slight moral concerns one might have are more than outweighed by the tremendous good that could be done with embryonic stem cells. It is this calculus that I find the most frightening. The act of deciding that this life is more valuable than that other is the act of devaluing human life.
I do not consider myself anti-science or against modernity, in any respect. Unlike Dr. Kass, I have no problems with cadaver dissection or consensual transplanting. I am quite supportive of adult stem cell technology, which is much further along than embryonic stem cell research. I want people to live as long as possible. But I don't think that anything done in the name of science or prolonging human life must be moral. I think, for example, that the Chinese use of prisoners for organ transplants is wrong, even if it saves lives. It should not just be up to scientists to decide these things, for they have a vested interest in pushing science to its limits. We should decide these matters together as a society. To do that we need more debate and discussion about what is really at stake here. It would be nice if this could happen without further name-calling.
More on Ron Bailey's Reason piece later.
11/29/2001
CHARMING STORY in the UK Times about the Afghan woman who George Bush sees fairly often-- his hairdresser. Since the war began she has lost two dozen clients because of her nationality, but the Bushies are known for their loyalty. The President has kept her on and even seeks her opinion on plans for her native country. She says she wants “the world to know this President isn’t fighting a war against the Afghan people because otherwise I would be the first one to be fired”.
BIZARRE GOOGLE SEARCHES: Here are some of the search strings that led people to dropscan or the photo site:
- "texan, patriotic, christmas" (You got me.)
- "lipstick index" (Look below.)
- "ceramic court flag penis" (Yeah, read on.)
- "photos of dead children" (No, you sick fuck.)
- "men who do things for themselves, clean, vacuum" (Have so far not felt the need to comment on such clever men, though I am blessed to be married to one.)
- "burka free photos" (La spécialité de la maison.)
- "urban legend" (See the links.)
- "Shiloh Bucher" (I got a little paranoid, but it turned out to just be someone looking for my email.)
- "hot photos of Sophia Loren" (Sorry, wrong site, Grandpa. My favorite search so far.)
FLIGHT 93 HEROS: Just got around to reading the incredible Newsweek account of Flight 93. It is an extraordinary story of the bravery of ordinary Americans, that had me shedding my first 9/11 tears in weeks. Here's an account of what the hijackers were up against:
If the hijackers had hoped for a timorous and infirm group of passengers, they picked the wrong plane. In addition to judo expert Glick and Tom Burnett, a take-charge type who had been a quarterback in college, there was Todd Beamer, who had never been the biggest or fastest guy on the court as a college point guard but who was known as a “gamer,” the team member who makes the winning play. Mark Bingham, 6 feet 5, had played rugby at Cal on a national-championship team. A risk taker, he had once been arrested for tackling the Stanford mascot at a football game. Lou Nacke, at 5 feet 3 and 200 pounds, was a weight lifter with a Superman tattoo on his shoulder. Rich Guadagno, an enforcement officer with California Fish and Wildlife, had been trained in hand-to-hand combat. Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles had been a detective on the Ft. Pierce, Fla., police force. William Cashman was a former paratrooper with the 101st Airborne; at 60, the ex-ironworker was still fit. Linda Gronlund, a lawyer, had a brown belt in karate. Lauren Grandcolas had organized a sky-diving expedition; on her fridge was a note, get busy living or get busy dying. Alan Beaven, 6 feet 3, was a rock climber and former Scotland Yard prosecutor. The hijackers had been training for two years; the passengers came together in a few minutes.
THE PHOTOS: I've gotten a huge response to the photo site. Thanks to everyone who's linked to it or shown it to someone. There have been a few people who have dismissed the pictures as propaganda or had issues with my choice of captions. Some definitions of propaganda clearly fit, namely if by propaganda you mean anything that advances an argument or point of view in support of a policy. By this definition, many major newspapers put forth nothing but propaganda.
I found most of the photos on the wires; some came from other news outlets. Together, they make up a photo essay of sorts, one that seems to deal more completely with all of the new-found freedoms of the Afghans than has been seen elsewhere (let me know if there are others). This is one of the beauties of the internet-- that I can play "photo editor" with my picks of AP and Reuters (at least until I get shut down, which I'm a little surprised hasn't happened yet, except for one photo).
The goal of the photo collection is to show that the US bombing of the Taliban has resulted in the liberation of thousands of people. But the fact that I have that goal in showing the pictures should not take anything away from the credibility of the photos themselves. They are mostly pictures taken by AP and Reuters photographers, who are famous for their independence from the US government. They are also highly respectable professionals who can be counted on not to have doctored any of the images. I can assure you I did not skip over any pictures of the Northern Alliance bullying their new charges. It really is true that Afghans can now enjoy simple liberties that we take for granted, like shaving and going to the movies. Considering that they were also poor and starving under the Taliban, I believe there has been a net gain to the Afghan people from the bombing of the Taliban, even taking into account the civilian casualties.
I say that only by putting myself in their situation. If some theocrats took over Texas and tried to keep us from drinking or dancing or shopping on Sunday-- what am I saying- we have the Baptists! But if they also made women stay in their homes with the windows painted over, if they forbade them from going to the doctor and kept little girls out of school, or beat people for laughing in public, they would have to be stopped. If stopping them meant accidentally killing some innocent people, that would surely be a tragedy, yet a necessary one. I don't think, as some skeptics of the war seem to, that we cannot possibly understand how the Afghans feel about what has recently happened in their country. I think that's an extremely racist point of view, actually, to think that "those people" are in any way fundamentally different from us. They are human beings and they want to enjoy themselves, to laugh, to educate their children, to live free from fear. Nothing about that is so difficult to understand, and I think the pictures show it very well.
11/28/2001
BEEN FEELING A LITTLE UNDER THE WEATHER. Real weather, actually, we may even get a little snow on the ground tonight in Central Texas, of all places. Have consumed massive quantities of hot soup, ibuprofin, and cardamom tea and am able to blog a little, I think.
THE GREATEST LOVE ALSO THE MOST DANGEROUS? That's what a recent British study suggests. Turns out that some commonly-held beliefs about self-esteem are myths. Low-self esteem is not a risk factor for violent crime, racism, drug use, or dropping out of school. On the other hand, young people with high self-esteem are more likely to engage in risky activities, such as drunken-driving, which endanger themselves and others. So all the energy that has been spent trying to raise the self-esteem of our youth may have been tremendously misspent.
11/26/2001
BAD NEWS FOR THE ECONOMY: Lipstick sales are up since Sept. 11th, according to Estee Lauder. Women tend to buy a new lipstick when they can't afford a new outfit. The Lauder Lipstick Index has gone up in past recessions, as women treat themselves with what they view as an affordable luxury. Cosmetic sales are up in Kabul as well, I hear, but with the exception of black turbans, everything is moving off the shelves pretty quickly there.
GWICH'IN HYPOCRACY: Anybody who's following the ANWR debate closely should be interested in the news that the Gwich'in people have just joined an enterprise to drill for oil immediately east of a major migratory path for caribou. The Gwich'in have been used extensively in the anti-drilling propaganda war because of their opposition to oil exploration on the coastal plain of the refuge. They don't actually live there, but they have expressed concern that it might upset the caribou, which they consider sacred. Apparently they are not as worried about the effects of drilling on herds traveling near their own land.
Unfortunately, the Gwich'in's desire to restrict access to their sacred coastal plain ignores the native people who actually live there. You'd run into problems, too, if you decided that your next-door neighbor's backyard was hallowed ground, not to be touched. The Inupiat Eskimos who live in ANWR are very much in favor of drilling, because it will provide them with money for development. They have also seen firsthand the environmental success of oil drilling at nearby Prudhoe Bay, where caribou herds have quadrupled since 1968.
Many of the hysterical appeals to stop drilling in ANWR have focused on the fact that the Gwich'in people consider the coastal plain to be too sacred to even visit. For example, the Alaskan Wilderness League declares on it's website:
The Gwich'in share the range of the Porcupine River caribou herd, except for the place the caribou go to bear their young each year: the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To the Gwich'in, the coastal plain is sacred. Even in years of famine, the people did not travel to the coastal plain, where hunting would have been easy during the post-calving gathering of the herd.
Unfortunately, the Gwich'in's desire to restrict access to their sacred coastal plain ignores the native people who actually live there. You'd run into problems, too, if you decided that your next-door neighbor's backyard was hallowed ground, not to be touched. The Inupiat Eskimos who live in ANWR are very much in favor of drilling, because it will provide them with money for development. They have also seen firsthand the environmental success of oil drilling at nearby Prudhoe Bay, where caribou herds have quadrupled since 1968.
This conflict between the Inupiats and the Gwich'in mirrors that between Alaskans, who overwhelmingly support drilling on the coastal plain, and the many environmentalist mainlanders who will never visit ANWR, but just like the idea of preserving some piece of remote wilderness somewhere. Of course, most of ANWR (particularly the beautiful mountainous parts seen in the DNC ads) is permanently off-limits to drilling. And the caribou seem to thrive despite oil drilling, which is probably why the Gwich'in don't seem to mind drilling on land they control.
WATCH OUT OSAMA: Unbelievably, PETA finds itself on the right side of Operation Enduring Freedom. They are now targeting Osama bin Laden for running (gasp) tanneries and testing nerve gas on dogs. I hope this means they've ended their ill-conceived campaign to convince the poor of Africa that eating chicken when they can get it is wrong.
Matt Welch skewers Katrina vanden Heuvel and an UW-Madison professor for their "flawed assumptions and unintentional snobbery" in an LA Times op-ed Sunday. I know nothing about Professor Rogers but Ms. vanden Heuvel, the MCA heiress/ Nation editor, is famous (at least in the Bucher household) for being unable to name her Congressman on Hardball this summer, after being put on the spot by Matthews and Bob Dornan. I wonder if she even can be bothered to vote.
11/25/2001
THE WIDOWS: Fascinating story about the growing political power of the September 11th widows. They have susscessfully pressured the Mayor to keep the recovery project going at Ground Zero, even on Thanksgiving Day, and they want to have a voice in decisions on the future of the site, which they view as a burial ground. Many of them also feel the City has not been straight with them concerning the probability of further recovery of remains. Apparently, they seem to be the only group that Giuliani has ever been afraid of offending.
11/24/2001
JINGO BELLS, JINGO BELLS, JINGO ALL THE WAY is what I've been humming to myself today as I've trimmed my Christmas tree red, white, and blue. It was surprisingly difficult to find patriotic-themed ornaments yesterday, but I suppose demand for these hasn't been very high in past years. Maybe I should look on E-bay. At any rate, the tree looks sufficiently Martha Stewart-y and it's so blue, white, and red, I'll be lucky if Robert Jensen doesn't drive across town to burn it. Best keep it watered, just in case.
HAPPY DERVISHES, BALLOONMEN, RAZOR SALES STAFF, AND FEMALE DOCTORS are all back in business in Kabul and I've got pictures to prove it on the little photo site.
11/23/2001
RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE, LOCK AND LOAD! That's what Glenn Reynolds says this morning. I'm down with it. Today's the day after Thanksgiving and I need a Christmas tree. Plus, I had already been dreaming about sticking it to those Buy Nothing Day morons while driving back home from the folks last night. If I see one today, and here in Austin it's not unlikely I will, I plan to point out that buying things supports jobs for poor people and provides tax revenue for government programs. This anti-shopping "holiday" is the classic example of something which will do absolutely no-one any good, and thus is nothing more than yet another exercise in progressive self-righteousness. To the mall!
11/21/2001
THE FIRST THANKSGIVING, PRIMARY SOURCES: From the excellent resources at the Plimoth Plantation Museum. These are the only two contemporary accounts of the Thanksgiving of 1621, which we celebrate now as "The First Thanksgiving." William Bradford and Edward Winslow were early leaders of the Plimoth settlement.
"Our Corne did proue well, & God be praysed, we had a good increase of Indian Corne, and our Barly indifferent good, but our Pease not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sowne, they came vp very well, and blossomed, but the Sunne parched them in the blossome; our harvest being gotten in, our Governour sent foure men on fowling, that so we might after a more speciall manner reioyce together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they foure in one day killed as much fowle, as with a little helpe beside, served the Company almost a weeke, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Armes, many of the Indians coming amongst vs, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoyt, with some nintie men, whom for three dayes we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed fiue Deere, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed upon our Governour, and upon the Captaine, and others. And although it be not alwayes so plentifull, as it was at this time with vs, yet by the goodneses of God, we are so farre from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty." E.W., Plymouth, in New England, this 11th of December, 1621. in A RELATION OR Iournal of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth in NEW ENGLAND, by certaine English Aduenturers both Merchants and others. LONDON,Printed for Iohn Bellamie,..1622. pp. 60-61. "They begane now to gather in ye small harvest they had, and to fitte up their houses and dwellings against winter, being well recovered in health & strenght, and had all things in good plenty; for some were thus imployed in affairs abroad, others were excersised in fishing, aboute codd, & bass, & other fish, of which yey tooke good store, of which every family had their portion. All ye somer ther was no wante. And now begane to come in store of foule, as winter aproached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degree). And besids water foule, ther was great store of wild Turkies, of which they took many, besids venison, &c.; Besids they had aboute a peck a meale a weeke to a person, or now since harvest, Indean corne to yt proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largly of their plenty hear to their freinds in England, which were not fained, but true reports." William Bradford. Bradford's History, Of Plimoth Plantation. Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers... 1898. p. 127.
THE MENU OF THE FIRST THANKSGIVING: According to the History Channel, the following things were not on the menu:
- Pumpkin pie (Yet to be invented, though they had-- yum, yum-- stewed pumpkin)
- Cranberry sauce (No sugar)
- Corn on the cob (Their corn was dried)
- Sweet potatoes (Weren't available)
The couple of primary source accounts we have confirm that venison and wild fowl were eaten at the big feast. Some other possible menu items:
- Swan
- Eel
- Baby seal (Yes, I'm serious-- the History Channel says seal, no reason that wouldn't mean baby seal.)
- Acorns
- Crane
- Eagle (Check it out if you don't believe me.)
- More palatable items might have included lobster, chestnuts, carrots, clams, leeks, cod, plums, and grapes.
THE FIRST THANKSGIVING: Andrew Hofer has some insightful thoughts on the history behind our Thanksgiving holiday. It is a common misconception that the celebration of Thanksgiving is a yearly tradition that goes back to the first years of the Puritan settlement in Massachusetts. Andrew sets us straight:
Go read the rest. It's good stuff.
Thanksgiving was not an annual holiday until Lincoln declared it one in 1863. In fact, the word "Pilgrim" did not come into use until around that time. This holiday did not yet have its association with the Plymouth Rock settlers. Prior to Lincoln, presidents commonly called one-time national days of thanksgiving. The evolution of the holiday as we have come to know it occurred between the end of the Civil War and World War I. It appears to have been an outgrowth of the "Colonial Revival" movement in which American culture reacted to the post Civil War period and the industrial revolution by harkening back to the country's more simple roots.
Go read the rest. It's good stuff.
A CAUTIONARY TALE: Sad news, pilgrim. Those turkeys the President pardoned a couple of days ago may not have much longer to live anyway. ABCNEWS.com reports that many of the past avian presidential pardonees haven't lived to see the next Thanksgiving. By the time they get to the President, they have become so plump that their little turkey hearts can't support them. Often they are just found dead at the petting zoo. Food for thought as we stuff ourselves tomorrow.
SO THAT'S WHERE THE MONEY COMES FROM: A puzzling article notes that the Flood of donations to fight deadly diseases dries up after September 11th. Before the WTC atrocities, $2.9 billion dollars was pledged to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria around the world, and since 9-11, only $4,000 has been pledged.
I can think of two reasons for this. One, the bulk of the $2.9 billion was probably pledged by governments, who now have already given. Two, since the outpouring of money to the victims' funds has come primarily from Americans, it must be American individuals who the UN is counting on to fund this fight against infectious disease. That's fine; we are already the largest giver of foreign aid in absolute amounts in the world. But how about a little credit here?
NAIL LACQUER, BURQALESS TEACHERS, and an ingenious use for the yellow plastic food bags, plus much more on the photo page. Thanks for the links from Overlawyered.com, the Rant Blog, Matt Welch, Stephen Den Beste, worldcrossing.com, Fredrik Norman, and Reid Stott, whose own photo page inspired me .
UH, SORRY, NOT GOING TO HAPPEN: Taliban spokeman, Syed Tayyad Agha, has suggested that it's time to forget about the terror attacks of September 11th, which he characterized as "Not our problem." He told journalists yesterday:
Yeah, tell that to the thousands of children who are going to be missing a parent tomorrow and every following day of their lives.
You should forget the Sept. 11 attacks because now there is a new fighting against Muslims and Islam, and the international and global terrorists like America.
Yeah, tell that to the thousands of children who are going to be missing a parent tomorrow and every following day of their lives.
Or, maybe they could talk to Sheima, the 30 year-old widow of a Northern Alliance POW massacred by the Taliban several weeks ago. She told an LA Times reporter, "I'll never forgive the Taliban, never! Not until judgment day. They should all die."
11/20/2001
HERE'S A PREDICTION: Americans to Pile on Calories This Thanksgiving says Christopher Doering of Reuters. He claims that Americans have decided since the terrorist (my term) attacks on September 11th that life is too short to eat healthy and exercise. Frankly, this has not been the case for me; terrorism turns my stomach. In fact, I just started eating yogurt again after that last fateful bowl on the morning of 9-11. Also, jogging has kept me sane and given me a place to think about it all. Plus, everytime I've worn my jogbra and shorts since the attacks it has been with the happy thought that the Taliban despises my right to do so.
It is the luckiest thing in the world to be a Western woman. Not just the fact that I'm a Texan, but that I was allowed to live past infancy, taught to read, permitted to go to graduate school, to choose a husband, to wear what I want, to vote, to hold a checking account, to drive, to write whatever I want on this gorgeous laptop. It's amazing and beautiful and pure luck. Dammit, I have much for which to be thankful.
IS NORWAY HEAVEN? Yes, according to the LA Times which ran a feature saying so a couple of weeks ago. Not exactly, says Fredrik Norman, who actually lives there. Fredrik gives us the inside scoop on the state of the Nordic welfare state in an article on his website, fredriknorman.com
HOW COULD IT BE OTHERWISE? British citizens who have gone to fight for bin Laden and the Taliban face arrest if they return to the UK. This seems pretty basic-- how could you go to fight for your country's enemies and think you'd be welcomed back, no questions asked? But then, these guys don't come off as very bright in the first place.
BEYOND BURQAS: Interesting commentary in the British Independent by Mary Dejevsky. She cautions against the idea that Afghan women can be liberated simply by removing their veils:
More burqua-free pictures on the photo site.
If there has been much wishful thinking about what casting off the burqa will mean, however, there has been almost as much unthinking condemnation of the veil. Underlying much of what has been said about the defeat of the Taliban and the re-emergence of women has been a simplistic and culturally restrictive equation: uncovered – good; covered – bad. The burqa, which is so heavy and so all-encompassing, has been raised to totem status in the West and among Westernised Muslims as worst of all, a symbol of all the evils inflicted upon women by Islamic fundamentalism. The reality is, however, that it ill behoves "liberated" Western women to denounce the veil as a symbol of oppression alone. The veil – whether it takes the form of a full burqa, a black chador or just a headscarf worn low over the forehead – is a cultural phenomenon that cannot just be thrown off overnight. For many, especially in rural areas, it is less a mark of subjugation than a protection. In their male-dominated societies, they will be treated as "loose". Their husbands may leave them: and few have an education or means of sustenance outside their marriage. While the enforced wearing of the veil is something Western women can justifiably condemn, it is the force, not the wearing, that is wrong. To take another view is patronising to Muslim women and may spell danger for them, too.
More burqua-free pictures on the photo site.
THE IDEA FOR THIS COMMERCIAL? PRICELESS. All summer I was vaguely charmed by a series of MasterCard commercials showing two friends traveling across country visiting all the major ballparks. They even went to Camden Yards a couple of weeks before we did. Now it seems likely that the ad guys completely ripped the idea off a documentary about two friends who really made such a pilgrimage, though I doubt they spent so much on memorabilia.
11/19/2001
CAN WE PLEASE START A DONALD RUMSFELD FAN CLUB? Here he is on taking no prisoners among the mercenaries of Kudunz in The Times:
Via the excellent Rantberg.
Any idea that those people in that town who have been fighting so viciously and who refuse to surrender should end up in some sort of a negotiation which would allow them to leave the country and go off and destabilise other countries and engage in terrorist attacks on the United States is something that I would certainly do everything I could to prevent. They're people who have done terrible things.
Via the excellent Rantberg.
MOVIE RIOTS, SATELLITE DISHES AND MORE at the photo page. It's clear that the Afghans were starving for entertainment. How else do you explain the melee that resulted when Kabul's movie house opened for the first time in five years? Snobby Americans like David Brooks will turn up their noses at such plebeian delights, but how can you be so dismissive of something that gives such happiness? Easily enough, I guess, if you're a prig.
THE TIMES' TAKE ON TAXES: Over the weekend, Andrew Hofer had intelligent comment on the biased tax coverage in the NYT on his site More Than Zero. What's interesting about the Times's economic coverage is that Dean Baker also does a pretty successful job of knocking them and The Washington Post down from the Left every other week in his Economic Reporting Review. It's amazing and scary how sloppy and careless they can be, considering they are the papers of record in this country. Good thing we have the blogs.
11/18/2001
ARAB TOLERANCE: In what was billed as a celebration for Ramadan, the second most popular television program in the Arab world featured a skit in which an actor playing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drank the blood of Arab children. The program was shown over the weekend on Abu Dhabi Television, which is produced in Kuwait. The idea that Jews drank the blood of Christian children, or even used it in Passover matzohs, received a lot of play in the Middle Ages, but it can still be seen in Arab newspapers.
Considering that this is what gets served up as a holiday treat in the Islamic world (instead of, say, "It's the New Moon, Charlie Brown"), it's no wonder if the "Arab street" hates us. How can we possibly win the "hearts and minds" of the Arab world, when all they know is this kind of horrible propaganda about the west? The Israelis are going to report this incident to the UN. It will be interesting if they can bring themselves to condemn it, when propaganda passed out at their Racist Conference in Durban also pictured Jews with Arab-child blood dripping from their fangs.
READY FOR MY SHOT: I've been wondering lately who exactly is responsible for the absence of a nifty little vaccine scar on my arm and the smallpox protection that it implies. Now I have a candidate-- D. A. Henderson, who ran the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication program from 1966 to 1979, which was somewhat prematurely declared a success. It may very well be a success. There haven't been any natural outbreaks of the disease in more than twenty years and clearly WHO's program of vaccinations deserves the credit. But it seems to me incredibly naive to have halted vaccinations in 1972.
What they've created is a huge target populace for bio-warfare. Yes, in a perfect world we would have destoyed the two remaining vials of smallpox already. But it seems to me that anyone charged with protecting the health of the world, if they were paying attention at all in the Twentieth Century, should have taken very seriously the possiblity that bad people could do very bad things with the virus if you stopped vaccinating children. Henderson grumbles in the NYT profile about Bush's decision not to destroy our sample of the virus, saying that it should be destroyed so that possession of smallpox can be made illegal. As though some kind of international law would stop terrorists from unleashing plague on whomever they please. If smallpox virus possession is made a crime, then only criminals will possess the smallpox virus. Well, NSS. Who else would have any use for it in the first place? We do not make ourselves safer by relying on laws alone to protect us, especially international laws. I'm glad to see we're going to start vaccinating again.
WHERE'S MY VIOLIN? Such a sad story in the Chicago Sun-Times about a Pakistani Talib who went over to Afghanistan to kill Americans and instead has now found himself in a mud hut, at the mercy of the Northern Alliance. The "young idealist," as the reporter chooses to call him, now claims: ''I came to Afghanistan to just look at the place, to understand what was happening.''
Uh huh, right, he just wanted to look around. But then he complains he got only three days of military training. I suppose that was just for self-defense on his little walking tour of understanding. The Northern Alliance clearly don't see it that way, and our young idealist is lucky to still be alive. Much better this guy is in a unheated mudhut, though, than making trouble for Musharraf in Pakistan.
TROUBLING ISN'T EVEN THE WORD-- While Afghan women burn their burqas and celebrate the freedom to go to beauty parlors, Western women are mobilizing to fight for their right to starve themselves into fashionable oblivion. A recent Time article also documents the "pro-anorexia" presence on the web. Many of the websites it lists as giving tips and support for young women who want to achieve that death-camp look have been shut down, but it was easy to find others this morning. Here's one for the strong-stomached, but, then again, nausea is their forte.
NEW PHOTOS of Afghan life after the Taliban-- teenage girls on TV, bathhouses, a cockfight, general celebration. Women have been burning their burqas and visiting beauty parlors, which will no longer be secret establishments. They are making plans to return to work. Even the pictures of women still wearing burquas on Afghan streets reveal a substantial change from the Taliban regime, where women were beaten just for leaving their homes.
11/17/2001
I THOUGHT HE WAS AFTER NATIONAL GREATNESS David Brooks has a surprisingly snide and glum rundown of the possible responses to the success of the war so far. First, he dismisses Cheney's right to gloat:
Who's having the delusions here? I seriously doubt the step-up in bombing had anything to do with the grousing we heard from The Weekly Standard. It was more likely the result of a decision to trust the Northern Alliance to take the country without atrocities, which they have done. And none of the other things Brooks suggests-- the warnings that the war will be long or the engagement of the PR firm-- indicate that the administration did not know that their strategy would succeed. Of course, no one is omniscient, but only the press ever claims to be so. Cheney and company have every right to gloat, because they made the military decisions which have resulted in the rout of the Taliban.
Ha, ha. What's so crass about the pursuit of happiness, be it soccer or listening to music? What a freakin' sourpuss.
For example, in making his gloat, the vice president had to overlook a few inconvenient facts that indicate that perhaps the administration wasn't exactly omniscient during the course of the war. A few days ago, the administration told us that this would not be a war of instant gratification, though this part of the war certainly has been. A few days ago, the administration took the extraordinary step of hiring an outside advertising team, so convinced were they that the United States was not doing well in the court of public opinion. At the end of October, the administration shifted its bombing strategy after critics rightly pointed out that the bombing campaign up to that point had been tepid.
Who's having the delusions here? I seriously doubt the step-up in bombing had anything to do with the grousing we heard from The Weekly Standard. It was more likely the result of a decision to trust the Northern Alliance to take the country without atrocities, which they have done. And none of the other things Brooks suggests-- the warnings that the war will be long or the engagement of the PR firm-- indicate that the administration did not know that their strategy would succeed. Of course, no one is omniscient, but only the press ever claims to be so. Cheney and company have every right to gloat, because they made the military decisions which have resulted in the rout of the Taliban.
Brooks then dismisses the Afghans' happy exercise of new but basic freedoms as getting "shallow."
They're enjoying all the crass commercial pleasures that have been denied them for the past few years. They're watching television. They're listening to pop music. They're playing soccer. They're showing off their movie star baseball cards. They are going shopping. Come to think of it, this is what President Bush wants America to do.
Ha, ha. What's so crass about the pursuit of happiness, be it soccer or listening to music? What a freakin' sourpuss.
EVIL BERT STRIKES AGAIN! Stephen Den Beste, who constantly lives up to his name, noticed this hilarious bit of information in The Daily Rotten: the nuclear bomb plans that the Taliban left behind in Kabul, which everyone has been fretting over, were downloaded from a joke website! A casual glance at the shots of the documents taken by the BBC reveal them to be a printout of the scientific parody, "How To Build An Atom Bomb," which first appeared in the satirical journal, The Journal of Irreproducible Results (now called The Annals of Improbable Research) in 1979.
Here's a little sample of the "Construction Method," which it notes is written in the same format as the previous week's issue: "How to Build a Time Machine."
1. First, obtain about 50 pounds (110 kg) of weapons grade Plutonium at your local supplier (see NOTE 1). A nuclear power plant is not recommended, as large quantities of missing Plutonium tends to make plant engineers unhappy. We suggest that you contact your local terrorist organization, or perhaps the Junior Achievement in your neighborhood.I don't know how helpful this could have been to Al Queda since they were the local terrorist organization. It goes on to suggest such useful tips as holding the plutonium together with rubber cement and packing TNT around it with Play-Doh.
11/16/2001
NEWS FLASH: Ramadan is a lot more fun without the Taliban. Part of Ramadan is the fasting through the day, but the other part is the partying after sundown, which goes on through the night. Now Afghans are permitted to laugh and play music. Praise Allah!
UNDER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER: From NJ.com the first pictures I've seen of the underground parking garage underneath the rubble and of the PATH station. I've been wondering about these areas since the attacks. How many people were in there?
MORE LOVELY AFGHAN LADIES UNBURDENED BY BURQAS at the photo site. Plus, a soccer shot from the stadium the Taliban used like the Colosseum.
AS USUAL, ANDREW SULLIVAN ROCKS If you didn't already go to andrewsullivan.com this morning, you should. In fact, you should look at him first thing every morning, long before coming here, because he's so damn good. Today, he's got the following awesome quote from, of all people, the Unabomber, which I only post here for my own future reference:
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
A TERRORIST AT BARNES AND NOBLE WSJ's Opinion Journal has a great story on an Evanston, Illinois book signing at Barnes and Noble by unrepentant domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. Ayers is now even more famous for saying in an ill-timed September 11th NYT puff piece that he wished he'd set off more bombs.
11/15/2001
THEY'RE GORGEOUS! Inspired by PhotoDude, I've created a photo blog, where I've posted some pictures of Afghan women unveiled. It's clear they weren't wearing those bags because they're ugly.
OF KYOTO AND TERRORISM Fredrik Norman points out this great article by British historian Paul Johnson in Forbes (free registration required). Johnson argues that the War on Terrorism has created compelling security reasons for the US to continue to reject the Kyoto Treaty:
The world has been roused and, led by America, is now taking international terrorism seriously for the first time. It is attacking terrorist bases and host states; it is arming against terrorism by creating new forces, weapons and intelligence systems. But these efforts are going to cost a vast and increasing amount of money and resources, most of which will be supplied by the U.S. Now is not the time to diminish America's ability to make this effort against an overwhelmingly obvious threat to humanity by paralyzing its muscle-power in order to meet an unproven--possibly imaginary--one. That is why I say there is a direct connection between Bush's reasonable refusal to implement Kyoto and his decision to wage war on terrorism.The scientific reasons for rejecting the treaty, of course, stand as well.
FINALLY A USE FOR THE HUMAN TENT You may be wondering, how did those special forces helicopters find the aid workers in the dark? Well, The Hindustan Times reports they were guided by a bonfire of the women's burquas, just as rogue Taliban fighters were closing in on them. Let's hope all women in Afghanistan will soon burn theirs!
AND PEOPLE WORRIED ABOUT BUSH'S SKILLS OF DIPLOMACY? Roll Call reports that Tom Daschle arrived late for a meeting with Putin Tuesday and then proceeded to joke around with the Russian President about his height. Daschle reportedly said it was nice to work with a world leader of similar size and then ran his hand over his head to emphasize just how short he is. Putin apparently didn't find this very amusing. At least Daschle didn't offer the Russian president one of those phone books he sat on to avoid being upstaged by Dick Gephardt in a joint press conference this summer.
BOY, WERE SOME FOLKS WRONG If you haven't seen them already, Andrew Sullivan has a fine selection of many nominees for his new Von Hoffman Award for embarrassingly unprescient pundits. It's named in honor of Nicholas von Hoffman, who published this gem in The New York Observer, several days after the fall of Kabul:
We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. In the history of aerial bombardment, can you think of a single instance of the bombed embracing the bombers? Bombing always unites the bombees against the bombers, and-duh!-guess what the reaction has been in Afghanistan? You don't need to speak Urdu to figure it out, which is good since none of us does ... Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we've been trying to make common cause-and who, we've been hinting, will take part in a postwar government.
HOORAY! I am a little surprised at how overjoyed I am that those fool aid workers were rescued. I'm just so happy that there will be eight fewer grieving families than anticipated. And the two girls from Waco will be home for Thanksgiving.
11/14/2001
IDIOCY UPDATE: The New Republic has been running a poll on a selection of some of the most asinine statements made since September 11th and they've published the results. It was damn hard choosing, but I ended up picking Sunera Thobani's unbelievably moronic claim,
"There will be no emancipation for women anywhere on this planet until the Western domination of this planet is ended."I went back and forth between Thobani and Alice Walker who blathered:
In a war on Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden will either be left alive, while thousands of impoverished, frightened people are bombed into oblivion around him, or he will be killed in a bombing attack for which he seems quite prepared. But what would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love.Alas, Michael Moore won with:
Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!Though I'm tempted to demand a hand recount (can they do that with javascript?), I have to admit Moore's really stupid, too.
SABOTAGE? According to Aviation Week, there's no sign of a bird strike in the engines of Flight 587, which are themselves in good condition considering they fell off the airplane. And the first thing to go was the vertical stabilizer which was found in pristine condition in Jamaica Bay. Without the stabilizer, there was no way to control the plane. Maybe some bastard loosened its screws?
KALAMATH FALLS UPDATE Looks like there may be legal recourse for those farmers. The Yakima Herald-Republic reports they have retained an attorney who specializes in protecting property owners from government "takings" of water rights. Last year he successfully argued that the government should compensate a group of Central California farmers as much as $50 million for the loss of their water rights, which were reduced to protect endangered salmon.
The problem with the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act is that the main costs for protecting the species have not been shared throughout society. They have been shouldered for the most part by unlucky property owners in loss of land value and utility. Under the Fifth Amendment, the government is not supposed to be allowed to take property without just compensation. It's nice to see that it is not just the Tories who are fighting for their rights in court and winning.
AL-JAZEERA SMOOSHED BY GIRL POWER? I haven't seen this anywhere else but The Telegraph reports that people on the ground in Kabul heard that it was a female pilot who took out the office of Al-Jazeera. The station owner's son-in-law reports:
"We're astonished. How could they hit one building in the centre of town? This accuracy is something beyond our comprehension. When the Russians attacked us they hit everything all around."
LET'S GLOAT! Christopher Hitchens says "Ha ha ha to the pacifists" in The Guardian. One of the most irritating mantras of the peaceniks in the past few weeks has been the faux contrast-- "The poorest nation on earth is being attacked by the richest." As though warfare should be means-tested. Hitchens offers some contrasts of his own:
What about, "Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one"? "Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women." "Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones." "Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime."
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that Afghan women find new freedom in the newly liberated Kabul. And The Washington Post reports on how one man in Kabul feels about his fleeing oppressors:
"These Taliban are dogs!" he said. Then he added, "I'm sorry I abused the dogs, because a dog is a very faithful animal."
11/13/2001
RIGHTS FOR THE RIGHT: Fascinating article in the Spectator about how British conservatives are learning to play the rights game. While many of them condemned the European Convention on Human Rights as an attack on the British way of life, it is now actually proving to be a useful tool in defending traditional values.
THE END OF THE ORIENTALIST CRITIQUE: Charles Paul Freund has a brilliant must-read piece in Reason Online which finds Edward Said and company definitely guilty of... Occidentalism! So how does Occidentalism differ from Orientalism? It doesn't!
Orientalism, the systematic stereotyping and degradation of Easterners that dehumanized them in the eyes of the West, enabled the colonial powers not only to mistreat whole populations, but also, in some of the West’s blackest moments, to slaughter them in horrifying numbers. What makes it possible to commandeer passenger planes filled with innocent travelers, including children, and use them as bombs to murder thousands of people in office buildings? It is a systematic stereotyping and degradation of Westerners that dehumanizes them, and makes their death a pious deed for some and a cause for celebration for others. It is Occidentalism.
BAMIYAN UPDATE: Not content with destroying its ancient Buddhas, the Taliban decide to lay the city to waste on their way out, according to the BBC.
GOOD NEWS AT HOME: Welfare reform is still working, if by working you mean reducing poverty among children and adults. According to Ron Haskins in The Washington Post yesterday:
For the seventh year in a row, poverty was down. Further, black and Hispanic households had their lowest poverty rates ever, and the overall child poverty rate was lower than in any year since 1976. Similarly, black and Hispanic households both set records for all-time high incomes. How is the nation making such remarkable progress against poverty and low income? The Census Bureau report shows that an important part of the answer is that welfare reform has led to huge increases in work and earnings by single mothers and a revolution in how government helps the poor. No longer does government help the poor primarily by giving them welfare benefits. The new approach is to encourage, cajole and, if necessary, force poor and able-bodied parents to take jobs. Then, once they are employed, government provides help through a system of work supports that includes cash earnings subsidies, primarily through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), medical insurance, food subsidies, child care and housing. The Census Bureau data show how this new approach works. Consider the group of about 2 million families headed by mothers with incomes under $13,000. In 1993 this group earned on average only $1,400 and had welfare benefits (primarily cash and food stamps) of $4,400 (all figures are adjusted for inflation). By 2000, their earnings had increased by 130 percent, to $3,100, and their welfare benefits had declined by a quarter to $3,300. In addition, they enjoyed a 300 percent increase in EITC income. The net effect was that total income for these mothers and children rose by a quarter, to $8,600. Now consider the group of 2 million mothers with incomes between $13,000 and $21,000, a group that includes many mothers leaving welfare. Earnings increased from $4,900 in 1993 to $11,700 in 2000. Similarly, EITC income increased by nearly 200 percent. Although the welfare income of mothers in this group fell by nearly 60 percent, their total income increased by more than $4,000, to $17,600. Progress against poverty over the 1993-2000 period is equally remarkable. Child poverty declined by nearly a third to 16.2 percent, its lowest level since 1976. Moreover, for three of the past five years, poverty among black children declined more than in any year before 1995 and has now reached its all-time low. Deep poverty, defined as income at half the poverty level (about $7,000) or less by the Census Bureau, has also declined sharply and is now well below its previous historical low.
SO THEY'RE NOT BOY SCOUTS: The New York Times claims that Executions of P.O.W.'s Cast Doubts on Alliance. By POWs, they mean surrendering Taliban troops, many of them foreign fighters from Pakistan and Chechnya. I suppose this does violate the Geneva Convention, but it pales in comparison to the atrocities the Taliban has committed after taking cities. And isn't this matter of dealing with captured troops something of a moral grey area? They were, after all, quite recently shooting at the Northern Alliance, and may very well have killed some of their men. Unlike The New York Times, I weep no tears for dead Taliban.
NEED SOMETHING ELSE TO WORRY ABOUT AT 2:30 AM? How about terrorists concealing plastic explosives in their own body cavities? It's a yucky thought, but entirely doable. In this report from Wired, an Israeli terrorism consultant claims that:
It's not appropriate for an analyst of terrorism to consider anything absurd that is technically very feasible, and I would say yes, this is. I have not heard this scenario discussed, but Tom Clancy wrote up a plot that involved crashing a jet into a building, and the federal authorities classified it as a low probability.I would claim it is now entirely appropriate to consider even the absurd threats now. In an asymmetrical war, creativity is one of their weapons, as is the ability to commit unthinkable acts.
11/12/2001
AMERICA THE OMNIPOTENT: Last Week in the New York Press, Andrey Slivka had some fine insight into our hero, Noam:
What's maybe most worthy of contempt in the Chomskyan attitude that the U.S. is ultimately to blame for 9/11 is the Babbittry at the core of it. The Chomskys of the world seem to believe that the U.S. is, in some mystical way, the source of all power, all energy, all motion on this planet and in the universe. The U.S. is the primum mobile--everything originates here, there are no other sources of energy or volition in the whole of the universe. No one and nothing else has any power to accomplish anything. If fruit drops from a tree on the other side of the world; or an iceberg cleaves in the Arctic Ocean; or children starve in Bosnia; or maniacs steer jetliners into the World Trade Center towers, then somehow the U.S., being the ultimate cause of all value and reality on Earth, must be responsible for it. This is very similar to the view to which subscribes the proverbial ignorant, arrogant, jingoistic American patriot who haunts the collective consciousness of the editors of Le Monde and of the European intellectual class. The difference is that the Chomskys see this mystical power as a dangerous one, while the patriots consider it an unimpeachably good one. But it’s the same attitude in each case, and it’s a flabby, decadent one—the product of coddled people who inhabit a civilization that’s been so obliteratingly strong for so long, that they can’t imagine that anything outside of it could possess the power of agency. You wonder if, at the secret core of the Chomskyan position, there doesn’t lurk a racist disbelief that the world’s turbaned or dark-skinned people are capable of anything at all. After all, only America can cause things. Only our system is effective enough to do anything. Yesterday Jim Knipfel mentioned in this space that there’s a 1 in 5000 chance that a doomsday asteroid could hit Earth in the next century. I imagine that, if it does so, the Chomskys will spend their last minutes on Earth wondering what the U.S., in the mystical omnipotence they flatter it with, could have done to cause this.
RUMORS OF WAR: After gloating about how Seymour Hersh was duped by a source, Alexander Cockburn falls for the Nancy Oden story (scroll down), which is already on the invaluable urban legend site, snopes2.com.
AFGHANISTAN'S HIJACKERS: When I heard on 9/11 that a plane had gone down in Pittsburgh, and before I knew about the passenger revolt, I secretly hoped that we had been able to shoot it down. Not only would shooting down our own civilian plane foil whatever evil the hijackers on board had planned, but it would show the world what cold American resolve and determination looked like. As it turns out, President Bush gave orders to shoot down Flight 93 if it threatened targets on the ground. Before the F-16s which were tailing it could carry out Bush's order, though, the passengers overtook their captors and destroyed the plane themselves. When I heard about the heroism of those passengers, I stopped being disappointed that the Air Force didn't take it down, but I was still proud that Bush had given the order.
In Slate (which is almost unreadable these days, except in Print view), William Saletan raises the question of why, if we are willing to kill our own civilians to stop terrorists from attacking people and buildings on the ground, the prospect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan should keep us from destroying the terror-making capabilities of Al-Qaida.
In Slate (which is almost unreadable these days, except in Print view), William Saletan raises the question of why, if we are willing to kill our own civilians to stop terrorists from attacking people and buildings on the ground, the prospect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan should keep us from destroying the terror-making capabilities of Al-Qaida.
Al-Qaida and its Taliban agents have hijacked a nation, making it a base of operations for mass murder and terror. They're using the civilian inhabitants of this base as human shields. If we refuse to attack the terrorists, many more civilians around the world will die. So we have attacked, and some of our bombs have killed innocent people. Each of those deaths is terrible and tragic. But we're no more responsible for them than we would have been for shooting down that plane full of innocent Americans. We didn't put the lives of Afghan civilians at risk. Afghanistan's hijackers did.
GOOD NEWS ON A BAD DAY Matt Welch had a link to this from The Economist this morning regarding rising Third World longevity:
People are living longer for many reasons: better food, cleaner water, more effective medicines. How did they get these things? It helps that the poor are getting richer: average annual incomes in developing countries doubled between 1975 and 1998, from $1,300 to $2,500 (in 1985 dollars at purchasing-power parity). It does not hurt, either, that their rulers are getting less despotic: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, 100 developing countries have ended military or one-party rule. (Angola was an exception to both these trends.)
ART OR HATE OR BOTH? There was an uproar at the Boulder Public Library a few weeks ago when the library director refused at first to hang an American flag inside the library for fear of offending people who find the flag offensive. This uproar intensified when it was noted that this same library had an art exhibit of 21 brightly colored phalluses (phalli?) hanging in its lobby. Then, over the weekend, the exhibit was stolen and Old Glory was left in its place. Within the day, it was recovered in the home of the thief, a man who said he found the art offensive.
I'd have to agree with him. The exhibit, which was called "Hanging 'Em Out to Dry," consisted of painted ceramic penises nestled inside of knitted "cozies" hanging from a clothesline with a noose tied at one end. According the library, it was placed there in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Now, I'm no semiotics expert and I haven't seen the piece, but it appears to me, from the descriptions, to advocate the sexual mutilation and possible lynching of men in retaliation for domestic violence. What's more, there's nothing in the description that directs these threats at particular abusers, rather it seems to be addressed to anyone with a penis to be "hung out to dry."
This is offensive, if anything is. Yet there is a segment of the Left that sees this instead as a brave artistic statement. If men are offended, well, that would be the point. Only certain groups, such as haters of the American flag, have a right not to be offended in a public library.
I'd have to agree with him. The exhibit, which was called "Hanging 'Em Out to Dry," consisted of painted ceramic penises nestled inside of knitted "cozies" hanging from a clothesline with a noose tied at one end. According the library, it was placed there in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Now, I'm no semiotics expert and I haven't seen the piece, but it appears to me, from the descriptions, to advocate the sexual mutilation and possible lynching of men in retaliation for domestic violence. What's more, there's nothing in the description that directs these threats at particular abusers, rather it seems to be addressed to anyone with a penis to be "hung out to dry."
This is offensive, if anything is. Yet there is a segment of the Left that sees this instead as a brave artistic statement. If men are offended, well, that would be the point. Only certain groups, such as haters of the American flag, have a right not to be offended in a public library.
Many Voters Simply Did It Wrong, according to the LA Times:
Floridians wrongly drew stars, circles and Xs on ballots. They used pens instead of pencils, or red ink instead of blue. They tried to erase errors, or fix them with tape or staples. They tried to vote for pro golfer Tiger Woods and Cuban shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez. Many tried in vain--and in error--to vote for two, three or even all 10 presidential candidates.
11/11/2001
BUSH WINS IF ILLEGAL VOTES NOT COUNTED Oh, to be back in Mexico, where we watched the recounts from our honeymoon suite... Well, Tuesday was our first anniversary, and it's nice to hear that they've finally finished counting chads in Florida. Good thing we went ahead and inaugarated a president in the meantime, since this little matter of a war came up before they put away their abaci. Thank God for the Electoral College, which limited the debacle to Florida, rather than every close-matched state. And let's hear it for the Supreme Court, who only hastened the inevitable, as The Washington Post makes clear:
Under any standard used to judge the ballots in the four counties where Gore lawyers had sought a recount-- Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Volusia-- Bush still ended up with more votes than Gore, according to the study. Bush also would have had more votes if the limited statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court and then stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court had been carried through.
CALLOUS NEWS NETWORK? Protests in Atlanta at CNN over their war coverage. Strangely enough, it's not because they're waging a propaganda war for the Taliban. Seems some folks who like to wear bandanas over their faces and who did not receive the Isaacson memo think CNN is neglecting the plight of the starving Afghans. Unfortunately, while there isn't a law against pointy hoods, it's illegal to mask your face while protesting in Georgia. In a freak instance of fairness, three arrests were made.
Of course the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is tragic, but the Taliban have been causing it for years. Why didn't Georgia's anti-globo element protest before, if it cares so much for the Afghan people?
Of course the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is tragic, but the Taliban have been causing it for years. Why didn't Georgia's anti-globo element protest before, if it cares so much for the Afghan people?
11/9/2001
EVERYTHING THE US DOES IS WRONG At least according to some people. Timothy Roscoe Carter, a reader of Matt Welch's site, writes in with a brilliant listing of all of the ways we can't win when dealing with despots:
What should we do about a repressive regime? Option 1) Military Aid. Obviously wrong. We are providing the weapons that kill the innocent. See Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Reagan-era Iraq, etc. Option 2) Economic Aid. Wrong. We are financially propping up the regime. See Egypt, Indonesia, etc. Option 3) Humanitarian Aid. Still Wrong. By relieving the regime of its financial duty to feed its people, we free up their money for military uses. See Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban by providing $43 million in humanitarian aid in exchange for the Taliban not exporting Heroin, thus sacrificing 12 million women to the alter of the failed War on Drugs. Option 4) Trade / Constructive Engagement. Wrong. This is merely an excuse for US corporations to profit off of the regime's repression of its own people. See China and Reagan-era South Africa. Option 5) Economic Sanctions. Wrong. The economic sanctions in Iraq have killed 6,000 people a month for the past 11 years, or nearly 800,000 victims of US foreign policy. Option 6) Military Attack. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! See every military conflict that the United States has every engaged in. (Caveat: There may be a possible exception for the US Civil War, which will be considered obviously justified if you are talking to any white person born in the former Confederacy.) Option 7) The Prime Directive. Wrong. It is intolerable for the most powerful nation in history to sit by and do nothing while thousands die. It probably stems from a racist lack of concern for people of color of persons of other religions. See Rwanda, Bosnia (not to be confused with Kosovo, which falls under Option 6, above).
A VICTORY: The Taliban confirms that the Northern Alliance has regained control of Mazar-e-Sharif. In the New Republic this week, Peter Beinart details what happened when the Taliban took the town in 1998:
We, of course, all remember how the anti-globalist Left took to the streets around the world the next day to protest those 6,000 dead Afghans...
They entered a multi-ethnic city with a substantial population of Hazaras, a Persian-speaking, Shia minority clustered near the Iranian border. The Taliban despised the Hazaras--first, because the Hazaras had fiercely opposed their rule, and second, because the Sunni Taliban considered the Shia Hazaras to be infidels. And so the conquering Taliban governor addressed the Hazaras from the loudspeaker of a city mosque. According to Human Rights Watch, Mullah Manon Niazi declared that, "Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shia. They are kofr [infidels].... If you do not show your loyalty, we will burn your houses and we will kill you. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan." With that, Taliban soldiers went door to door. They looked for people with Asiatic features, supposedly a Hazara characteristic. Hazaras were told to convert on the spot--and say a Sunni prayer as proof. Those who did not were killed immediately or taken to the city jail from which many were transported to the countryside and then executed. To teach the few remaining Hazaras a lesson, Manon Niazi decreed that the dead bodies remain on the streets for close to a week. Asiaweek estimated the dead at over 6,000.
We, of course, all remember how the anti-globalist Left took to the streets around the world the next day to protest those 6,000 dead Afghans...
IMPOTENT FURY Unable to come up with data to combat his ideas, Bjorn Lomborg's opponents have now taken to throwing baked goods at him. He just got a pie thrown at him by environmental activist Mark Lynas in Oxford. Lynas said he "wanted to put a Baked Alaska on [Lomborg's] smug face, in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice, and worsening effects on animal and bird life." Never mind that the Arctic ice pack moved 200 miles farther south in Alaska this January than it normally does.
11/5/2001
TALIBAN'S BAD KARMA: Hindu leaders in India say that the US strikes are divine retribution for the Taliban's destruction of the 1500 year-old giant Buddhas in Afganistan. The Taliban felt guilty about these attacks immediately after, but only because they regretted that they hadn't done it sooner. To make things right with Allah, they sacrificed 100 cows. No word on the karmic debt resulting from this slaughter of sacred cows.
SHOCKING: According to The New York Times, many people who live Off the Grid in Idaho find their routines unchanged after the recent terrorist attacks! It's typical NY-centrism to think that the rest of the country must be on edge if they are. Most Americans, even those like me who use electricity, probably haven't changed their day-to-day routine since 911.
Public Skips Florida Election Hearing It's nearly been a year, and no one cares any more what counts as a vote in Florida. No one, that is, except that weasel Jeffrey Toobin.
GOLDEN PARACHUTES A company is selling high-rise chutes, for which there is now a pretty good market.
Wendy McElroy has a typically terrific piece on why the war in Afghanistan is not one to force American style feminism on Afghanistan:
A lasting peace is the prerequisite for improving the lives of every human being in Afghanistan. It is in that peace where Afghan women will almost certainly make remarkable advances. The global attention and money now directed at their cause almost guarantees this progress. It can occur through diplomacy, global pressure, the funding of women's rights agencies. But any "advance" for Afghan women that occurs due to a fear of U.S. or U.N. military action is unlikely to last.
10/31/2001
ILLCONCEIVED: Great review by Mary Eberstadt of Naomi Wolf's new book Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood. Eberstadt describes the book as a "wide-ranging monologue of complaint about almost every aspect of pregnancy and birth, including pregnancy handbooks, weight gain, cesarean sections, episiotomies, cold hands, 1980s medical-office architecture, maternity clothes, suburbia, childbirth classes, hospital decorating schemes, obstetrical checkups, fetal monitors, anesthesia, diaper bags, park benches, and much more."
This seems to be the consensus in the reviews. Ian Sansom described Wolf in The Guardian as unbearable. An accompanying interview with Wolf ("Just look at a playground. What do playgrounds say to women? They say - 'you know what, just fuck you! You haven't anywhere to change dirty diapers - fuck you, deal with it.") prompted one Guardian reader to write to the editor:
How long do we have to listen to middle-class women moaning about looking after their kids? I stay at home to look after my kids. Hard work, but not as hard I bet as being married to Naomi Wolf or one of her pals.
10/30/2001
Canada's Globe and Mail gives a report on underground schools for girls in Afghanistan. These schools are dangerous, and since the Taliban took over, girls lag far behind boys in learning. But even the boys are behind. According to the article, "subjects such as science were scrapped in favour of rote study of the Koran." This is exactly the reason that one expert on the history of Islamic science gives in the Times today for the fact that only 1% of the world's scientists are muslim.
10/29/2001
ANYONE REMEMBER WHY THE UN GOT A NOBEL A FEW WEEKS AGO? One of the reasons given was Kofi's rise to the challenge of international terrorism. In typical UN fashion, this involved a working group, which the other day failed to meet a deadline to overcome its chief stumbling block. They couldn't agree amongst themseves what is terrorism. Yep, can we please give them more power to solve the world's problems? Because it's clear they've got what it takes to do it.
Stanley Kurtz points out a great article in the The Wilson Quarterly, which dissects the vituperative things law professors have had to say about the majority ruling of Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. The authors don't defend the decision per se, but they do a terrific job of taking down the legal scholars who have argued so sloppily against it, concluding:
Reasonable people may differ over whether Bush v. Gore was correctly decided. But the charge that the decision is indefensible is itself indefensible. That this untenable charge has been made by legal scholars repeatedly and emphatically, and with dubious support in fact and law, is an abuse of authority and a betrayal of trust. If scholars do not maintain a reputation for fairness and disinterestedness, their own legitimacy may well suffer grievously in the eyes of the public, and so could American democracy.Berkowitz and Wittes also give examples of previous cases in which the conservative justices have ruled using equal protection arguments or against state supreme court interpretations of state law.
ROMANIA ALONE: As of this spring, only one industrialized nation had signed the Kyoto Treaty-- Romania. With a standard of living ranked between Libya and Lebanon, they have the least to lose. And according to Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books, post-Communist Romania is still at the Bottom of the Heap, economically and environmentally:
Communism was an ecological disaster everywhere, but in Romania its mess has proven harder to clean up. In the industrial towns of Transylvania, in places like Hunedoara or Baia Mare, where a recent leak from the Aural gold mine into the Tisza River poisoned part of the mid-Danubian ecosystem, you can taste the poison in the air you breathe, as I found on a recent visit there. The environmental catastrophe is probably comparable in degree to parts of eastern Germany or northern Bohemia, but its extent is greater: whole tracts of the country are infested with bloated, rusting steel mills, abandoned petrochemical refineries, and decaying cement works. Privatization of uneconomic state enterprises is made much harder in Romania in part because the old Communist rulers have succeeded in selling the best businesses to themselves, but also because the cost of cleaning up polluted water and contaminated soil is prohibitive and off-putting to the few foreign companies who express an initial interest.Communism was an ecological disaster, because it was an economic disaster. It is expensive to think green. The restrictions of the Kyoto Treaty would have required the US to constrict its economy by at least $100 billion a year. And if we were to accept them, we would be, like Romania, too poor to focus on the environment.
BACK AGAIN: A moratorium was put on blogging this weekend, so that progress could be made on my thesis.
C'EST BIZARRE! France is behind us! They, of course, have some experience with Islamic fundamentalists.
UPDATE: Here is the story: Les deux-tiers des Français approuvent l'intervention militaire en Afghanistan. Overall, there is a split between the right and the left. Guess which one supports the US?
10/25/2001
AFGHAN NATIONAL SPORT: It's buzkashi! According to this AP photo essay, buzkashi is a sort of polo played with a headless goat carcass. Just wait till PETA hears about this.
ISLAMIC TOLERANCE? From the Pakistani newspaper DAWN:
Indian Army faces animal suicide attacks in Kashmir: New Delhi, Oct 25Since the cow is sacred to many Indians, wouldn't it be more than a little insensitive of Islamic fundamentalists on the Kashmiri border to lob bovine bombs at them?
The Indian army battling Mujahideen in Kashmir have identified a new threat in possible suicide bombing attacks by animals, reports said today. The Indian Express newspaper reported that the Indian army was constructing cattle traps on the roads ahead of sensitive installations to stop such attacks. Quoting defence sources, the paper said the militants would only have to strap explosives on cattle, mules and donkeys and force them to run towards security establishments and then trigger an explosion.
CAUTION If you notice a strange white substance on your car, it may not be anthrax. A recent biohazard scare in Baltimore turned out to just be vulture droppings. Considering how close they are to DC, you'd think they'd be used to this kind of crap.
ESKIMOS FOR ANWR DRILLING: In the ANWR debate, we've heard a lot from the Gwich'in people, a Native American tribe who oppose drilling in the Refuge. But they do not control the part of ANWR under consideration for oil exploration. (And they are bitter hypocrites-- they actually allowed exploration on the land that they do control, but unfortunately found no oil.) The Inupiat Eskimos own the oil rights to ANWR and very much support drilling there. In fact, they just filed a complaint with the IRS accusing the anti-exploration Alaska Wilderness League of violating their non-profit tax-status. They charge the AWL, which works closely with the Gwich'in people, with exceeding the lobbying expenses allowed to 501(c)(3)'s in their fight against drilling.
10/24/2001
After two devastating failures in 1999, there were a lot of sighs of relief last night at NASA when the Mars Odyssey probe obeyed orders and moved into orbit around old Red. The Washington Post headlines the story, With Mars Probe Maneuver, NASA Finally Catches a Brake, which might give the impression NASA had had some bad luck in '99. Actually, whether or not they make billion-dollar errors of incompetence at taxpayer expense has always been entirely within their control. The success of this mission was considered crucial from a PR standpoint, and enormous energy was focused on getting it right this time. But why weren't they practicing this level of perfectionism to begin with?
QUESTION: Which do you think helped bin Laden more: a cache of sniper rifles the US may have sent to the mujahedin in 1989 or the millions of dollars he received from the UN through a fake Sudanese charity set up by an Saudi businessman?
10/23/2001
TICKET OUTTA HERE: Click here to help pay for one way fares to Sudan, China, and Afghanistan for those who consider America to be a imperialist, oppressive nation.
GREENPEACE VS. FREE SPEECH Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, writes of a recent encounter with his former colleagues in Canada:
Earlier this week, Greenpeace activists in Paris successfully prevented me from speaking, from Vancouver via videoconference, to 400 delegates of the European Seed Association. The Greenpeacers chained themselves to the seats in the Cine Cite Bercy auditorium and threatened to shout down the speakers. The conference organizers decided to retreat to the Sofitel Hotel, where many of them were staying. The auditorium is in a very important building and they did not want their conference to be associated with an incident there. As the Sofitel does not have videoconferencing capability, my keynote presentation was cancelled. When I helped to create Greenpeace from a church basement in Vancouver in 1971, I had no idea that I would spend the next 15 years as an international director and leader of many Greenpeace campaigns. I also had no idea that after I left in 1986 they would evolve into a band of scientific illiterates who use Gestapo tactics to silence people who wish to express their views in a civilized forum. And I could never have guessed that my former colleague and then teen-age founder of Greenpeace France, Remi Parmentier, would be the one issuing the orders to silence me.Moore was set to speak on the safety of genetically modified food.
SOMETHING WE NEED TO SEE Jarold Hayden argues in The San Francisco Chronicle that the media has been wrong to shelter us from the carnage in lower Manhattan.
Are explicit death scenes merely propaganda to stir us up, or a "cheap sensationalizing" of tragedy, as those who bring the news to us seem to believe? The media treat us so condescendingly: We're given only what some believe we "need to see." But consider this: That there are Americans who don't understand that these terrorists are not rational people, and that they want us to die because we don't embrace their fanatically distorted religious zeal. That there are Americans who don't get it, who feel that we need to negotiate, to go on as if nothing has happened, to take the blame upon ourselves for being attacked, to forgive, ad nauseam. That there are those naive enough to believe that we are the real terrorists, that American policy has something to do with fanatical animosity. Or, as some Oakland and Berkeley high school students believe, that since this didn't occur on our coast, in our cities, it's just not our problem. Considering this, maybe that's exactly why there is a real need for all of us to know in explicit detail just what has occurred.Though I agree with Hayden in the main, I seriously doubt pictures of body parts are going to get through to the kumbaya crowd.
Harvard's looking at grade inflation after a Boston Globe report found that more than half of Harvard alumni graduated with honors. Sorta like Lake Wobegone, where all the kids are above average.
HILLARY MEETS THE HEROES Margery Eagan makes the connection between Hillary being booed by New York's finest at Madison Square Garden and the incident the previous weekend, when Senator Clinton's van breached airport security and sent a police officer to the hospital.
10/22/2001
Excellent analysis by William Arkin in The Washington Post of Civilian Casualties and the Air War in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Iraq. While the military has gotten progressively better at "targeted" bombing from Dresden to Iraq to Afghanistan, few appreciate its successes at avoiding civilian casualties. Arkin says the Pentagon has only itself to blame:
U.S. commanders fear that a debate about civilian casualties opens U.S. military operations to even more external scrutiny, thus undermining sound military judgments, and turning war even more into an exercise in political correctness. The military's avoidance of the subject has now backfired. Because the military has produced no useful yardstick to understand how many civilian casualties might be expected given the level of effort, the tons of bombs, the types of weapons, the targets, or the population density, the armed forces wind up facing more and more constraints imposed by emotion. When civilian deaths do occur, they become exaggerated far beyond the significance of the numbers. The death of four Afghan civilians working for a United Nations de-mining outfit in Kabul was a tragedy that was not informed by any larger analysis of whether or not such an incident could be expected.
ANOTHER MIRACLE AT LOURDES? Maybe not. Russia's abandonment of the Lourdes electronic surveillance station in Cuba is a simple matter of economics and better organization of its priorities, according to the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
10/21/2001
TEXAS CONSTITUTION UPDATE: Because of some bad things that happened during Reconstruction, we have a state constitution that is so inelastic it requires a very wide variety of issues be settled by the voters every two years. Come November, we have some amendments that will, among other things, attempt to keep Texas from suffering the horrible fate Florida did last year, when it was the laughingstock of states during Indecision 2000. As was widely reported during the election debacle, though completely irrelevant, Texas already has laws determining the fate of hanging chads and when hand recounts are appropriate. The proposed amendments seek to prevent the House of Representatives from determining who Texas' electors go to, if there's ever another really close presidential race. According to The Houston Chronicle, Proposition 6 "would require the governor to call a special legislative session to appoint presidential electors if the governor thought that a final determination of the Texas vote wouldn't be made before the federal deadline for certifying electors." What I want to know is, how could this be enforced? What if the governor thinks a final judgment won't be ready before December 12th or 18th, whichever it really is, but he chooses not to call a special session? Do we really want to put this kind of power in the Texas Executive, especially considering the circumstances under which we come to still enjoy the Constitution of 1874 and its 390 amendments (and counting).
GEN X GENERALIZATIONS: I had hopes they'd eventually start picking on Generations Y and Z. But, no. Witness this headline: 'Generation X' seen less ready for war sacrifices. There are complaints that we haven't all signed up as the Greatest Generation did after Pearl Harbor. It's not a fair comparison, because there was already a large theatre of battle going when America was last attacked. I'm not sure what we're planning to do or how long they will need personnel. If the war widens, I'm ready to help fight, apparently not on the front lines, but that's fine. I don't think I'm the only person my age who feels this way. Also, Generation X starts with people born after 1961 and before 1981, according to this definition. I don't even think the military will take you after thirty-something. By the time Ramadan is over, a bunch of X-ers are going to be ineligible. So, let's hear it for Generation Y.
GREENER THAN YOU THINK Excellent review of Bjorn Lomborg's magnum opus The Skeptical Environmentalist in the Washington Post today. There's a nice summary of Lomborg's treatment of Kyoto:
The book's longest, most detailed chapter is on global warming and the Kyoto Treaty. Lomborg agrees that a warming trend is real but says that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change exaggerates the possible threats and present-day proportions of global warming, while neglecting the benefits of more carbon dioxide in the air and warmer nighttime temperatures. These changes would improve agricultural output in the U.S. and China, and make for vast increases in crop production for Canada and Russia. In any event, Lomborg is promoter of solar energy, which he believes will take over from oil as our major energy source in the next 50 years. His most stunning conclusion: Even if the Kyoto treaty were fully implemented, it would stave off warming by only about six years -- postponing it from 2100 to 2106. So what is the cost to the world economy of this almost invisible benefit we are to bestow on our great-great grandchildren? Anywhere from $80 to $350 billion per annum. Lomborg is very disturbed by these figures, since he sees health improvements as the greatest challenge now facing the human race -- especially the enormous gains against disease and poverty that will come from increasing the supply of clean drinking water and the quality of sanitation in the developing world. The costs of Kyoto for one year could give clean water and sanitation to the whole of the developing world, saving 2 million lives, and keeping half a billion people from serious illness. For future, unknown and perhaps nonexistent benefits, Kyoto would squander money that should be applied right now to real, life-and-death human problems. Lomborg's calculations are meticulous, his argument compelling: Implementation of the Kyoto Treaty would be an unforgivable mistake.More on Lomborg.
10/20/2001
IS NOTHING SACRED? Great piece in The Atlantic by Gregg Easterbrook defending the Narnia books from the dark forces of political correctness and corporate white-washing. According to Easterbrook, C.S. Lewis' chief critic in the UK, Philllp Pullman also writes books about precocious children exploring parallel worlds in search of divine truth. Sadly, his stories are a dark mirror image of Narnia--
driven by the premise that God is evil—a celestial impostor who pretends to have created the universe and who so intensely hates flesh and blood that he wants people to live a repressed, joyless existence followed by hell, even for the righteous. Christian illusions about God are to blame for all the world's miseries; Christianity is "a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all," one character declares. The protagonists in the books strive to acquire ancient, mysterious objects they can use to bring about God's death. Along the way children are tortured and murdered, often with Church approval.Ugh. No wonder he hates Narnia. He's the anti-Lewis. Another critic accuses Lewis of "corrupting children with allegory." Wonder how he feels about the Wizard of Oz.
YOU WOULDN'T SEE THIS IN AMERICA: The headline, that is, in this story in the British Telegraph: Two white suspects in bin Laden probe. It shouldn't really be so shocking to the Brits, either. For one thing, they have had plenty of experience with white terrorists. For another, Cat Stevens converted to Islam, so why wouldn't other white British guys?
IRONING UPDATE: Unfortunately, steaming your mail does not kill anthrax. The invaluable urban legend debunkers at Snopes have a special Rumors of War site that will also give you the lowdown on whether or not Osama bin Laden owns Snapple.
10/19/2001
SMOOSHED: A Danish analysis of breast cancer studies shows that mammograms don't reduce mortality in women of any age. And since women who get mammograms receive 30 percent more lumpectomies and mastectomies, they may do more harm than good. There is a lot of breast cancer hysteria out there, especially considering that heart disease and lung cancer each separately kill more women. Part of the problem is the way that breast cancer has become politicized in the last decade. Thinking that early detection was the answer, the pro-mammography crowd has done everything they could to raise awareness of the disease. It is now clear that this has only served to frighten people, waste medical resources, and hasn't reduced breast cancer deaths.
UPDATE: The Danish study was published in The Lancet today, the leading British medical journal. Now British cancer charities and mammography advocates are up in arms because they fear that it will reduce the number of woman who get screened. Which would be the point of the study and of another which came out this week showing that women greatly overestimate the benefits of screening. They are upset because the Danes discounted as flawed the two studies showing a clear mammography benefit. The researchers found that there had been no properly controlled study which had found a clear link between screening and reduced mortality. Part of the problem with doing adequate studies is that no one wants to be randomly assigned to the "control group" that gets no screening. Hopefully, this new survey will encourage woman to participate in more research which could settle this matter. But the advocates will need to be prepared to accept the possibility that they have been pursuing a useless path for years now. That's hard for anyone to do.
STELLAR stuff from Cathy Young on Reason Online concerning the wacky left's tension between multiculturalism and feminism. It boggles my mind how anyone can possibly claim, when faced with the burqa or with FGM, that all cultures are equal. But there remain those that do. Or who even claim that it is worse for women in the West.
JUST CALLED TO SAY... Article in the Christian Science Monitor on defections from the Taliban reveals this exchange:
One hour into a dead-of-night, four-hour march toward "enemy" lines, Cmdr. Galajang Malang couldn't resist radioing his Taliban superior about his planned defection. "It was a big surprise for him," Commander Malang says with a broad smile, just hours after safely crossing rebel lines 30 miles north of Kabul. He and his 10 dark-turbaned Taliban defectors - armed with their assault rifles and rocket launchers - let out roars of delighted laughter as Malang repeats the dialogue. "We joined the mujahideen against you!" Malang says he told his dumbfounded Taliban chief, Commander Habib, who pleaded with the soldiers to stay. "It's finished," Malang says he replied with relish. "We are already with them."These defections are occuring frequently and for the most part are confined to mujahideen who had previously defected to the Taliban in 1996. It's not surprising they would choose to leave the sinking Taliban now.
TROUBLING column by Thomas Friedman today in the Times. He was recently forced to check a pair of tweezers before flying. I had thought tweezers were allowed, having flown with a pair of Tweezerman tweezers post-911. To be sure, on the first leg of our trip they were closely examined by security and by my husband, who wanted assurance I had bought them before our marriage. And then on the way home, they were also given the once-over and an opinion from the guard's immediate superior was solicited. But on both trips they were eventually allowed on the plane because they were not scissors. Hopefully Friedman's experience was an aberration. Nothing beats airplane bathroom lights for tweezing. And what am I supposed to use for a weapon should the plane be hijacked? If I have to check my tweezers, won't that really mean that Osama bin Laden has won?
10/18/2001
THE EPA says that so many endangered steelhead trout are returning to north-central Washington rivers, they're considering opening season on them. Why not just delist them all together?
Steelhead is great spread with a little coarse-ground dijon mustard, sprinkled with fresh pepper, and broiled for maybe 10 minutes, or until it flakes. Serve topped with this minted tomato salsa. I think it best to use cherry tomatoes-- few things in life are more dependable. Even in Texas in the summer, it can be hard to lay hands on a decent beefsteak tomato. Like its fellow endangered species, salmon, steelhead trout is also a delicious source of Omega 3 fatty acids, but it's not at all salmony. It does have a gorgeous red color.
Neither fish is really endangered, as any trip to a decent fish market will show.
National Review Online's John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru have a smart take on Daschle vs. Gephardt in today's Washington Bulletin:
Tom Daschle's decision to reverse course on what he apparently told House leaders Wednesday morning i.e., the Senate would join the House in adjourning must be understood in the context of Democratic party politics. Today Daschle looks like a fearless statesman: His office infected by anthrax, but the majority leader forging ahead with Churchillian resolve. House minority leader Dick Gephardt, on the other hand, saw himself branded a "wimp" on the front page of today's New York Post. Both men are potential candidates for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and one of them just smeared a pie in the face of the other.It's nice to be able to admire Daschle's handiwork for a change.
POX PARTIES: Creepy story about parents who hold "chickenpox parties" rather than vaccinate their children. This is vaccine-phobia taken to new lows. Chickenpox can develop into some very serious complications and is worse the older you are. I still have some scars from getting chickenpox at 13 and would have loved to have gotten a shot at 6 instead. To a one, vaccines are much safer than the diseases they protect against. They also protect not only the person vaccinated but everyone he could potentially infect.
MORE GOOD NEWS: Americans are reducing their use of high-interest credit card debt and refinancing their mortgages. I wonder if this represents not just the consumer slowdown, but maybe a new financial sobriety.
THE GENERAL: Polls show Musharraf to have a 78% approval rating in Pakistan. Jane's also reports that all the major Pakistani political parties are united behind him. Only a minority supported the Taliban in the first place, and Musharraf has been doing a good job of shuffling their sympathisers out of his government. As military dictators go, he is good. Everyone will be watching to see if he does restore elections by next year, as he has claimed. But everything will also depend on how stable Pakistan and the rest of the region is in a years time. What you wouldn't want is "one man, one vote, one time."
10/17/2001
GOOD THINGS: Iron your mail with steam and a damp cloth to kill anthrax spores. For a Martha Stewart touch, fill your iron with linen water and use an antique flax dishtowel bought at auction. (Williams-Sonoma sells nice water exclusively produced at a small factory in France’s Provence region. According to the online catalog, "the custom of dampening linens with lightly scented Provençal linen water before ironing is popular in many French households. It makes the linen closet, not to mention the linens, smell heavenly." Just think what it could do for toxic mail.)
Next week: Mix your own generic substitutes for Cipro! Place a two week series in Martha's Extra Scalloped Bags (ribbons sold separately, I think) and distribute to neighbor children.
OUR SAUDI FRIENDS When I saw this headline: Saudis Alarmed by Spate of U.S. Media Attacks, I naturally thought it referred to the anthrax scares, which are starting to alarm me as well. Silly rabbit! The Saudis are upset about the mean things that Seymour Hersh, Mark Steyn, Thomas Friedman, Virginia Postrel, and the InstaPundit, among others have been writing about them. What exactly do they expect after offering us such lukewarm help in the fight against terrorism they have helped sponsor?
SERENITY NOW! Almost in time to protect the Texas N.O.W. State Conference for International Peace, Austin Police Chief Stan Knee has announced the creation of volunteer security patrols as part of our own Homeland Security Division. Our town has had more than its share of anti-Enduring Justice protests, so perhaps our anarchist population makes security concerns all the more important. I rather doubt it, though. They're mostly pretty lame as revolutionaries go, like their fearless leader Robert Jensen. To my knowledge, the most damaging thing they've ever done was keep Kissinger from speaking at UT a couple of years ago.
Open for discussion? Let's see... lower Manhattan is still smouldering, the House has recessed out of fears over all the funny envelopes of deadly powder the Senate has received, and Congress invoked the War Powers Act more than a month ago. I certainly hope this guy is opening his own mail.
Speaking of professors, The Austin-American Statesman found one at Sam Houston State University to say that our volunteer patrols are unnecessary:
Sam Souryal, a professor at Sam Houston State University's Criminal Justice Center, said he's heard of no other law enforcement agency in the state with such a program, and he questioned whether the measure was appropriate. "I find it very legitimate in wartime," he said. "Would the conditions we are in today justify wartime precautions and provisions? I think it's open for discussion."
Open for discussion? Let's see... lower Manhattan is still smouldering, the House has recessed out of fears over all the funny envelopes of deadly powder the Senate has received, and Congress invoked the War Powers Act more than a month ago. I certainly hope this guy is opening his own mail.
10/16/2001
RIPKIN REDUX Great essay by Paul M. Weyrich about whether we will ever have another Cal Ripkin:
So when we say there will never be another Cal Ripken, what is it we are saying? Outside of playing for a single team for an entire career, which under current rules may be next to impossible, why does Cal Ripken represent a by-gone era? Are we saying that there just won't be another player who will try to play in that many consecutive games? Are there no players left who will always refrain from ripping off their employer? Are we saying that there are no players left in baseball with Ripken's degree of humility? Are there no players who care enough about the fans, who, after all, are the ones paying the salaries of the players? Are there no players who will hang around after the game until the stadium lights go out? Are we saying that scandals and cheating are the norm and we should just accept that? Are we saying that it is passé for a player to have a decent family and to be a model citizen? Or perhaps what we are saying is that we might find some of these qualities in a player here and there, but certainly not all of these qualities in one man. It seems to me that rather than accepting the notion that there will never be another "iron man" we ought to instead say to the next generation: "Here was a model ballplayer. He represented the ideal. He wasn't perfect, of course. But his virtues far outweighed his vices. This is how he played the game. This is how he lived his life when he was a ball player. There was never a hint of scandal connected with him. He was not only a good family man but he was interested in and active in his community. Now, Little Leaguers, this is who we want you to emulate if you are blessed enough to go on to professional baseball. We want you to aspire to be the next Cal Ripken. Maybe even a little better than Cal."
BLOWBACK Seems Democratic Chief Terry McAulliffe has had to make a special trip to New York to persuade supporters of Freddy Ferrer, the apparent loser in last week's mayoral runoff, that a hand recount of paper ballots is not in the party's best interest. But many black and Hispanic Ferrer backers see parallels between Mark Green's extremely narrow victory over their candidate in a racially-charged race and the results of the last presidential election, which McAuliffe, and even Green, loudly maintained earlier this year was a conspiracy to disenfranchise Florida minorities. And just like Gore, Ferrer withdrew his concession over the weekend when it was discovered that 40,000 Green votes were double counted. Will Gore's tactics in Florida now become standard operating procedure for losing Democrats?
10/15/2001
BASTARDS! I haven't really been alarmed by the inept anthrax attacks, and I'm still not worried. But dammit, now the monsters have infected a baby! Granted it's the cutaneous kind, which isn't deadly, and they didn't target the seven-month-old infant. But this is why you don't leave anthrax-laced items lying around-- kids touch everything!
KHMER VERT Fascinating translation by Thomas Nephew of an article by Hans Christoph Buch in Der Spiegel comparing the Taliban with the Khmer Rouge. Buch doesn't go into the gory details that the former Taliban secret police recruit, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, did in The Telegraph a couple of weeks ago. One would be tempted reading Hassani's confession to think doing such things to another human being would be impossible, if we did not already know that the morally impossible was done by the Khmer Rouge and others.
ECO OPTIMISM I can't believe I haven't mentioned Bjørn Lomborg yet. Week before last, my copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist arrived hot off the presses of Cambridge and it it is extraordinary. A hefty tome of about 515 pages, with 2,930 endnotes referencing over 1,800 sources, it debunks just about every enviro-whacko scare ever detailed in a green direct mailing. Global warming? Check. The cancer epidemic? Check. Mass extinctions? Check. Eminent Malthusian global starvation, landfill crowd-outs, and suffocation from air pollution? Check, check, and...check. Yes, reports of our planet's terminal condition turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Pollution is being reduced, fewer people are starving, fewer Third World children are dying, forests are expanding, and Lomborg has the stats to prove it all.
Numbers, you see, are his specialty at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, where he is an associate professor. In 1997, after reading this enthusiastic Wired interview with the late Julian Simon, he set out with a few graduate students to disprove what he thought was "typical American right-wing propaganda," namely Simon's Panglossian claim that everything is improving except our expectations. Instead of debunking Simon, though, Lomborg debunked his own (and much of the educated world's) pessimistic ideas about the state of the environment. He wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist to set the record straight, and hopefully people will pay attention. It caused a big splash in the Danish media when it was first published there, but now it comes out in America when there's a war on.
Many of the same people who are against this war also accuse the US of raping the planet. Reading Lomborg's book might give them one less reason to hate America.
Numbers, you see, are his specialty at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, where he is an associate professor. In 1997, after reading this enthusiastic Wired interview with the late Julian Simon, he set out with a few graduate students to disprove what he thought was "typical American right-wing propaganda," namely Simon's Panglossian claim that everything is improving except our expectations. Instead of debunking Simon, though, Lomborg debunked his own (and much of the educated world's) pessimistic ideas about the state of the environment. He wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist to set the record straight, and hopefully people will pay attention. It caused a big splash in the Danish media when it was first published there, but now it comes out in America when there's a war on.
Many of the same people who are against this war also accuse the US of raping the planet. Reading Lomborg's book might give them one less reason to hate America.
MIXED REPORTS concerning our food drops. A report from disguntled aid workers labels it "useless," while interviews with hungry Afghans in the north indicate at least partial success in targeted landing and palatability. Refugees in northern Afghanistan are likely to be less starving than those who were under Taliban control, and the food may help them more.
NO COMMENT This one stands on its own. I'm just glad she's ok.
UPDATE: The headline has been changed to Officer injured by Clinton motorcade. No new details.
Clinton OK after airport incident (10/14/01) YONKERS - A bizarre accident at Westchester County Airport involved Senator Hillary Clinton's entourage Sunday. Sources tell News 12 Westchester that a vehicle in Senator Clinton's security team tried to bypass a mandatory check point at the airport, which has been under a heightened state of alert since the terrorist attacks. A county police officer attempting to stop the vehicle from getting through injured his shoulder. That officer was taken to Saint Agnes Hospital in White Plains, and his condition is not known. Senator Clinton, who turned 54 Sunday, was en route to board a private jet to an unreleased destination. The former first lady could not be reached for comment.Here's where she was headed.
UPDATE: The headline has been changed to Officer injured by Clinton motorcade. No new details.
10/14/2001
NATO SCHMATO Thoughtful analysis from Steven Den Beste on what real friendship among nations means. The British offered their help and support immediately after 911, and they've been more than good for their word-- even firing Tomahawks from one of their submarines on the first day. The rest of NATO hemmed and hawed and sputtered about a "measured response," and only now that the attacks are a done deal are pledging their help. Which we are ignoring for the most part, because we learned our lesson in Kosovo about how much help we could expect from Europe. Den Beste thinks that European voters will feel the snub and ask their leaders why their countries haven't been a better friend to America. I hope that's true and think such pro-American sentiments will most likely come from non-elites and, thus, probably not make any difference.
Smartertimes once again shreds the New York Times this morning. Take a look:
Today's lead New York Times editorial, about Saudi Arabia, says, "The monarchy should crack down on its own corruption and do a better job of distributing the nation's wealth so that economic inequities do not generate new legions of terrorists." The sentence is a real gem in the sense that it captures the New York Times view of economics and foreign policy all at once. For the Times wealth is something to be "distributed" by a country's government. In fact, there has been no government ever that has equitably distributed wealth, and certainly no monarchy. If you give the government wealth-distributing power, corruption and inefficiency invariably follow. In America, rather than having the government "distribute" wealth, we, for the most part, allow the natural workings of markets to distribute the wealth. The wealth distribution is determined by the free actions of individuals and businesses. Sure, the American government redistributes some of the wealth by taxing and spending. But if someone suggested that Washington needed to "do a better job of distributing the nation's wealth," they'd probably be greeted with a chuckle and the announcement that the Soviet Union tried central planning and state socialism and it didn't work. We don't so much think of wealth here as "the nation's"; we think of it as belonging to individuals. The Times seems to think different rules should apply in Saudi Arabia. Similarly odd is the claim that "economic inequities" generate terrorists. It's unclear how this happens. If the Times is claiming that aggrieved and jealous poor people become terrorists, then, in fact, that is at odds with recent experience; many of the terrorists involved in the recent suicide attacks on America were not poor. Their masterminds certainly were not poor. Osama Bin Laden is a multi-millionaire, and Saddam Hussein's net worth has been estimated in the billions of dollars. Maybe what the Times is getting at is that the economic inequities drive the rich to terrorism. But there are plenty of rich people who have not resorted to terrorism to ease their boredom. The Times editorial writers, to judge by their writing, are among those most upset about economic inequities. Yet they have not resorted to terrorism. If by economic inequity the Times means a large gap between rich and poor, then America has lots of economic inequity but has spawned few terrorists. Saudi Arabia lacks freedom and lacks equality of opportunity. The distribution and income inequality problems there, such as they are, are merely symptoms of those deeper problems.Poverty does not necessarily spawn terrorism or any other crime. We've really heard too often lately about the "poor" terrorists, when, in fact, they were largely middle or upper-income, like the spoiled rich kids in the "Weathermen" who attempted to educate America with bombs in the Seventies.
10/13/2001
WHY IS AMERICA RICH? Great editorial in the Omaha World-Herald on the causes of Third World poverty. Listening to bin Laden's apologists would lead you to believe the US has become rich by robbing the developing world. Actually, our wealth stems from our being, well, developed. It is the lack of the rule of law and an open economy and society that causes poverty wherever it is tried.
It is so much easier to blame America, though, than to change the developing world.
Economic hardship in developing countries stems in large measure from the actions of Third World governments themselves - from their mismanagement and inefficiencies in many cases, from their corruption and greed in others. In what ways do these governments demonstrate such behavior? By clandestinely siphoning off millions of dollars in foreign aid and dispersing it among cronies. By keeping major segments of the national economy under government control and imposing heavy taxes on the remainder, stifling economic growth. By failing to ensure protection of property rights. By refusing to guarantee an independent judiciary. By demanding bribes. By keeping the government contracting process a secret so that citizens won't discover the bid-rigging. By denying women a full role in the national economy and persecuting members of other religions, steps whose negative effects include choking off opportunities for economic growth.
It is so much easier to blame America, though, than to change the developing world.
The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror are examined in the Times today. Turns out bin Laden is "tapping into a minority Islamic tradition with a wide following and a deep history" that stretches back to medieval times:
Although many Muslims are horrified at the notion that their faith is being used to justify terrorism, Mr. bin Laden's advocacy of jihad, or holy war, against the West is a natural extension of what some radical Islamists have been saying and doing since the 1930's. These radicals were jailed, tortured and often executed in their home countries, particularly in Egypt during the 1950's and 60's, for their attacks on Western influences and their efforts to replace their own regime with an Islamic state. The Muslim extremists, members of Islamic Jihad, who assassinated the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, for instance, left behind a 54-page document titled "The Neglected Duty" that provided an elaborate theological justification for what they had done. Addressed to other Muslims rather than to the West, the document drew on earlier thinkers in arguing that rebelling against one's rulers — which is forbidden by most Islamic authorities — is in fact a duty if those rulers have abandoned true Islam.Doesn't this idea echo the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson says:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.This was a dangerous idea in the 18th Century and it becomes even more dangerous when adopted in a culture that makes no distinction between religion and the state. Especially so, when these religious radicals are deciding for themselves what the Koran says-- as bin Laden has in his decision that "killing innocents or even Muslims is permitted if it serves the cause of jihad against the West." Will the Islamic world have religious wars like those that wracked Europe after the Reformation?
10/12/2001
CHIPOTLE ALERT I think I promised recipes in the blurb which has not, in fact, ended up on this page. Here's what I did for dinner. I had these smoked pork chops on hand in case the Taliban came over for dinner. They come shrink-wrapped and keep for a month. I had suspected when I bought them that they would be similar in tenderness to the chops that Mister Dropscan likes from Castle Hill. These suspicions were completely borne out. I topped them with a little glaze made with a spoonful of honey and a spoonful of chipotle paste, with a chopped clove of garlic stirred in. They then spent maybe 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven which also contained some diced potato tossed with chopped green pepper and onions roasting on a flat pan. (The chipotle paste is made from a can of chipotles in adobo sauce processed with a can of tomato paste; this heavenly mixture never spoils under refrigeration and thus is always there when something calls out for chipotle, as things so often do.) Steamed broccoli rounded things out and it was a quick and quite good weeknight dinner.
$900 MILLION has been raised for the families of the 911 victims. That's a lot of money for 5,000 families. Many of these families, though, have not heard from any of the 140 charities managing these donations. Last week I saw a woman on O'Reilly whose husband worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm's owner, Howard Lutnick, made the media rounds following the attacks, frequently weeping and promising to take care of all the families of his dead employees. Unfortunately, this woman on The Factor had not heard from Lutnick and no one from Cantor was returning her calls. It was a very disheartening story. I just wonder what else this money is going to end up getting spent on, because how could it all go to the families?
"IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, the merciful and the gracious, McDonald's Indonesia is owned by an indigenous Muslim Indonesian": so declares a poster next to the Golden Arches inside a Jakarta McDonalds. A KFC in Makassar was bombed yesterday but there was minimal damage, thanks be to Allah.
SHOOTING TO THE END Pictures taken by Bill Biggart, the only professional photographer to die while taking pictures of the World Trade Center.
BLOGS! Interesting article on web logs in USA Today featuring comments by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds-- the InstaPundit! I discovered him through Virginia Postrel on 9/11 and he truly lives up to his name, posting fascinating information on a near constant basis. He's also a pundit outside of cyberspace, too-- he's been on Jim Lehrer and writes for FOXNews.com.
Massacre survivors of Rwanda and Srebrenica are protesting the award of the greatest of prizes to the Annan-helmed UN. You'd think the failure of UN "peacekeepers" to prevent atrocities occurring right in front of them would disqualify the organization from receiving a peace award just a few years later. This lack of actual recent UN peace successes leads me to believe that the Norwegians' decision for the Nobel Centenary is more about symbolism and politics than anything else (except perhaps some self-congratulation from the two former-UN delegates on the Committee). They like the idea of the UN and wish Bush was making more use of it.
National Review Online sends out its first volley against the Nobel Committee. Stay tuned, I'm sure more will follow. Leeden's ending is particularly nice:
All of us join in celebrating the selection, hoping that the war against terrorism will not deprive the committee of a rich supply of suitable candidates in future years.
IT'S AN ILL WIND that blows no one good. I can once again listen to NPR without cringing! The Left has halted its whinging about the Electoral College and criticizing every breath Bush takes and even the New York Times can now see what a lot of other people saw in W. last year. The New Republic is excellent this week, in particular Peter Beinart's TRB which examines whether certain Leftists are really concerned about a "chilling effect" on free speech or just using any excuse to oppose the war. I've already mentioned below how great Christopher Hitchens has been (here's a nice piece echoing Naipaul on the pursuit of happiness.) Even Jonathan Alter is worth reading these days!
Ken Layne thusly sums up our new found national unity:
Something weird is happening in this country, and it's not just Anthrax and suicide hijackers. The rational people on the Right and Left are finding -- surprise! -- that we have very much in common. We like it here, and we like the world. We like writing, we like stirring up some trouble, we like being alive and free to do what we want, even if that freedom can leave us unemployed now and then. We like to make stupid jokes, we like to insult public figures, and we like to bitch about our government and the cops and the IRS. But if some medieval nut sandwich wants to Tread On Me, I will gladly stand up with Joe Farah and Andrew Sullivan and Al Giordano and Tony Pierce and G.W. Bush and Amy Langfield and Matt Drudge and Matt Welch and Maureen Dowd and Chris Rock and Tom Petty and Kobe Bryant and Heather Havrilesky and Jeff Whalen and we will smite any motherfuckers who want to blow up the world.
IGNOBEL The Norwegian Nobel Institute has awarded the UN and Kofi Annan the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for their work toward "a better organized and more peaceful world." Huh? The official press release also mentions Mr. Annan's rise to the challenge of international terrorism, which I think can be seen best by the election of Syria to the Security Council this week.
I'm glad I looked into who exactly was guilty of this sham before I smashed my spouse's Ericsson in protest. The Norwegians are undoubtedly having their say about how the war on terrorism should be administered. What is interesting is that they speculate on their website that Alfred Nobel originally designated them as Peace Prize-makers over the Swedes because he thought that innocent little Norway wouldn't use the Prize as a tool of power politics. Woops.
10/11/2001
"SO FAR, SO GOOD. Way to go, military." I had to read it twice, but I think Molly Ivins is on the bandwagon.
TESTING LINKS Everything seems to work. Let me know if there are any problems with the site. There's now an email link above.
NOBEL NEWS The 2001 Nobel Prize has gone to the Trinidad-born British writer V.S. Naipaul. Here is an interview he gave to the New York Times in 1994. Also, the always fantastic Manhattan Institute has posted the 1990 Wriston Address given by Naipaul on "Our Universal Culture." This is definitely worth reading as much of it concerns the ways in which Islam conflicts with said universal culture. There is also a nice look near the end at the concept of the pursuit of happiness.
Naipaul has written two books on Islamic culture. In the most recent, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples he examines the non-Arab converts to Islam of Pakistan, Malaysia, and Iran. These peoples were colonized first by the British and more recently by Muslims, with the latter doing more harm than the former in Naipaul's view. I haven't read it, but anything so horribly condemned by Edward Said is probably worth while. Said can't quite wrap his post-post-colonial mind around the idea of Muslim imperialism. Unable to see Third World Arabs as anything other than forever sanctified by their suffering under British colonialism, he declares Naipaul a traitor to the developing world:
He is a man of the Third World who sends back dispatches from the Third World to an implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals who can never hear bad enough things about all the Third World myths.Love that "implied audience" jab. Ouch. I'm sure Naipaul has been considering the audience implications of the Swedish Academy's decision all day.
CHILLING EFFECT Thomas Sowell has a characteristically great column that examines the "chilling effect" that certain people are worried will quash dissent. Sowell rightly points out that the First Amendment does not protect anyone from having their views criticized. Au contraire, mon frère! All of ones fellow citizens have the same Constitutional right to say just how wrong one is.
Last week John Podhoretz expressed this perfectly in an exchange he had with a glossy-magazine reporter doing a story on how difficult it has been for dissenters in the wake of unprecedented public support of Bush's military response to the 911 attacks. She called Podohetz to take him to task for his "vituperative" attack on Susan Sontag's anti-American remarks in the New Yorker. As he explained to the reporter:
My main objection to Sontag's screed was her comparison between the unity of America's politicians in the wake of the worst foreign attack on American soil since the War of 1812 and the unity expressed by Soviet officials in the darkest days of that totalitarian empire. Sontag's view was "hateful," I told the reporter. She recoiled at the word. Wasn't an opinion like mine going to produce a "chilling effect" that stifled opposing views? I said I sure hoped so. I am concerned that Sontag's view of the United States will prevail, which would be very harmful to the United States. This is an argument I want to win, and I want her to lose. If, by subjecting her freely expressed views to an equally free expression of outrage, I might play a role in making the further expression of Sontag-style beliefs less acceptable in elite circles, I will have done my job. The right to express views, which is a glory of the United States, does not shield anyone from the consequences of doing so. Those consequences include being attacked by other writers - and even being fired by a boss who is embarrassed by what you've said or worried that what you've said might cost him advertisers and readers. That's part of the free market in ideas. Now, death threats are not part of that currency, certainly. They are illegal - they represent the limit of free speech. The comparison of an angry article taking issue with Susan Sontag's spurious and defamatory views of the United States to illegal death threats on Peter Jennings is itself an effort to introduce a "chilling effect" on public debate. It suggests there's no difference between taking someone to task for what he says and threatening his life.
WAITING FOR WORLDPEACE So far the Dropscan household has escaped the recorded phone messages of Texas gubernatorial candidate John WorldPeace announcing that opponent Tony Sanchez is "the worst possible choice for Democratic candidate for governor." Mr. WorldPeace, a.k.a. the attorney formerly known as Kenneth Edward Wolter, reportedly has an automated dialer telling answering machines statewide that Sanchez is a Mafia-connected dud. Sanchez would like to laugh him off as a crackpot, but the 90,000 calls a day WorldPeace has made (soon to increase to 250,000) have raised recognition of his already catchy name. I haven't gotten the call yet, but he might just be a good choice for the Democratic primary.
10/10/2001
ANWR NOW Alaskan Senator Frank Murkowski says that there are enough votes in committee and on the floor to pass an energy bill that would allow drilling in certain parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but the Democratic Leadership has abruptly stopped Energy Committee work on the bill. Their friends in the Teamsters won't like that, and that will probably be sufficient for drilling in ANWR to prevail. It should. As the Washington Post said fifteen years ago (before its conversion to radical environmentalism) the refuge is "one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on surrounding life…."
DROPSCAN'S MUM just sent an interesting report of Clinton's speech last night at Kennedy Center.
THIS is a most interesting possibility. Let's see... we give France Clinton, whom they already love and have always understood far better than we, and in return well, we could just say forget about helping with this little campaign in Afghanistan and we're even for saving them in the last two World Wars.
The answer he gave to the very last question he was asked was truly intriguing. When asked what further country he would like to be president of, he made note that were he to move to France & take up residence for but five short years he could then legally run for president. This would be legal because of the Louisiana Purchase. Since Bill was born in Arkansas, which was part of the Purchase from France to the US, he is eligible to run as long as he speaks French & has resided in France for the past five years. Interesting. Perhaps the EU would suit him better than the US--a fresh start!
THIS is a most interesting possibility. Let's see... we give France Clinton, whom they already love and have always understood far better than we, and in return well, we could just say forget about helping with this little campaign in Afghanistan and we're even for saving them in the last two World Wars.
PEACE UNDER ATTACK A story in the Wausau Daily Herald concerns protestors at the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point whose peace camp "to promote alternatives to war in Afghanistan" has been driven underground -- into the University Center basement to be exact-- by egg pelting and Draino bombs. In a quote that could have been written by the nearby Onion guys, one activist declares bravely:
As a group, I think it’s getting too dangerous. It seems like we’re risking our lives, and our lives are worth more than the movement of peace. We need to be realistic with what we can do with everything else we have in our lives.In a Monday article in The Pointer the protestors had vowed to remain in the area between the Fine Arts building and the library "until there is world peace".
LEFT OUT Christopher Hitchens has been my favorite Nation columnist since a 1992 "Minority Report" pointed out exactly what was wrong with both the Clintons. Though I stopped subscribing to The Nation five years ago because I began to find it shrill and then dishonest, I've still admired Hitchens a very great deal. For a while now, I've thought of him as the most principled Marxist we have. His dogged post-911 attacks on Islamic fascism have only confirmed this, as has his recent war with Chomsky. Now I discover I was wrong about old Hitch. He was secretly rooting for Thatcher back when I was starting grade school! I had been wondering how such eloquent defenses of the American spirit could be written by a socialist. (See, for example, "American society can outlast or absorb practically anything") Now I know.
BERT IS EVIL My brother pointed me to this site years ago. Now my hero, the InstaPundit, learns that Bert has an Bangladeshi connection which can also be seen more obscurely here and here. Another case of the enemies of modernization using its tools?
IMPERMISSABLE THOUGHTS? Leon Wieseltier has a terrific "Washington Diarist" in this week's The New Republic in which he chastises Ari Fleischer for recently giving our brave American contrarians some much-desired oppression. Wieseltier also gives a damningly cogent summary of some of their more courageous ideas:
To wit: Osama bin Laden is a shy, enigmatic, and cruelly misunderstood individual. There is nothing more urgent in the world than the satisfaction of the Palestinians, and the attacks on New York and Washington would not have happened if Israeli tanks had not spent a few hours in Jenin last month. Capitalism and democracy are the cunning devices of imperialism. The United States has brought mainly misery upon the nations of the earth. Saddam Hussein is an innocent victim of America's surrender to Zionism. Terrorism is a form of political criticism. The use of force against terrorists is not different from the use of force by terrorists. A greater measure of vigilance in America is really a greater measure of racism in America.FORTUNATELY, facts and logic can counter the above opinions much better than Fleischer's quasi-official kibosh. Unfortunately, there are those who cannot tell the difference between being argued against and being oppressed.
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